U.S. President Donald Trump canceled the planned summit with North Korea on Thursday, citing "open hostility." (Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

This is a developing story... check back for updates...

Citing what he calls the "tremendous anger" and "open hostility" in Pyongyang's most recent public statement, President Donald Trump on Thursday cancelled the planned summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un that was set to take place next month.

"You talk about your nuclear capabilities, but ours are so massive and powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used," Trump wrote in a letter to Kim.

Read the full letter:

Reacting to Trump's letter on Twitter, independent journalist and Korea expert Tim Shorrock noted that the statement on Thursday by North Korea vice-minister of foreign affairs Choe Son Hui—in which she referred to Vice President Mike Pence as a "political dummy"—appears to be "what set Trump off."

But, Shorrock added, Trump has no grounds to complain about "open hostility" given "the hatred and military threats spewing from his vice president and national security adviser" John Bolton.

Trump complains about North Korea's "open hostility." Does he even listen to the hatred and military threats spewing from his vice president and national security adviser? Did he know the Pentagon was deploying B-52s in US-SK air drills? All this happened BEFORE NK's outbursts.

May 22, 2018

US Expects EU to Sacrifice Economic Interests in Order to Impose Sanctions

by John Lawrence, May 22, 2018

Trump's unilateral withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement sets the stage for reimposing sanctions on Iran. However, European countries have billions of euros in trade deals with Iran that would go by the wayside if they followed through and reimposed sanctions. They didn't want out of the nuclear deal in the first place, and they don't want to let go of those trade deals.

Take Italy for example. Their economy is struggling, and they have billions of euros in trade deals signed with Iran that could help their economy. They are blocking the EU from participating in Trump's sanctions. If one country in the EU blocks the sanctions, the EU cannot reimpose sanctions. Trump's capriciousness in backing out of the deal would cost other countries billions of euros if they go along with Trump whom they disagree with vehemently in the first place. Let Trump fuss and fume and tweet all he wants. Finally, the EU as well as other countries are standing up to him and will find ways to circumvent the American dollar.

The US is screwing around with major European economies all because of Trump's volatility and arbitrariness. His is a government by pet peeves and irrationality. He knows nothing about government or world affairs. Instead he has a layman's angst over perceived threats to his self-interest. His impetuousness leads to the US shooting itself in the foot and offending our allies. Case in point: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo threatensto impose the “strongest sanctions in history” on Iran. The French economy minister proposes that Europe fight the U.S. sanctions by compensating European businesseshurt by the sanctions.

The pipeline between Russia and Europe is a major investment that Europe will not give up no matter how much Trump tries to bully them. The Nord Stream II pipeline connects Russia to Germany through the Baltic Sea. Germany gets a third of its natural gas from Russia.

France's Engie is involved. Germany's Uniper and Wintershall are stakeholders. So is Royal Dutch Shell of the U.K., meaning all three signatories to the Iran deal are also getting punished for doing business with Gazprom.

Gazprom was sanctioned by Obama in July 2014, but not by Europe. Europe relies on Gazprom as its chief foreign source of natural gas. This is particularly true in Germany, where Russian gas accounts for nearly a third of supply.

In August 2017, Nord Stream II was placed under discretionary sanctions, which is sort of like sanctions-light. It means a company can proceed, but faces the risk that Treasury may decide to go after them someday.

The Trump Administration later added Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller to its sanctions list in February. Worth noting, Exxon was fined a couple million dollars last year just for signing a legal document with Igor Sechin, the sanctioned CEO of oil firm Rosneft. Exxon is disputing the fine.

Gazprom and Miller are the latest persona non grata in Washington. But Europe is not giving up on them. Not the French. Not the Germans. Not the Brits, either.

With the Iran deal being canceled, European leaders impacted by it are likely to be in "enough is enough" mode when it comes to Washington. These extraterritorial sanctions are not in their interests.

OK. Europeans disagree with Trump's withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal which was working great as far as they were concerned. They developed economic ties and interests with Iran which are, after all peace time activities designed to further understanding and peaceful development. Now Trump wants to punish our allies and cause them economic hardship because of his capriciousness. What's wrong with this picture?

May 18, 2018

"Indeed, so long as Imperial Washington is stretched about the planet in its sundry self-appointed missions of stabilization, "peacekeeping", punishment, attack and occupation, there is zero chance that America’s collapsing fiscal accounts can be salvaged."

Like the case of Rome before it, the Empire is bankrupting America. The true fiscal cost is upwards of $1.0 trillion per year (counting $200 billion for veterans and debt service for wars), but there is no way to pay for it.

David Stockman was President Ronald Reagan's Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Republican Congressman from Michigan and author of the following books:

The Reagan Economic Plan, 1981 The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, Harper & Row, 1986 The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, PublicAffairs, 2013 Trumped!: A Nation on the Brink of Ruin, and How to Bring it Back, 2016

The original headline of this article was: 'Why the Empire Never Sleeps: The Indispensable Nation Folly, Part 1'. Stay tuned for Part 2.

David Stockman, America's financial conscience and scold

That’s because the 78-million strong Baby Boom is in the driver’s seat of American politics. It plainly will not permit the $3 trillion per year retirement and health care entitlements-driven Welfare State to be curtailed.

The Trumpite/GOP has already sealed that deal by refusing to reform Social Security and Medicare and by proving to be utterly incapable of laying a glove politically on Obamacare/Medicaid. At the same time, boomers keep voting for the GOP’s anti-tax allergy, thereby refusing to tax themselves to close Washington’s yawning deficits.

More importantly, the generation which marched on the Pentagon in 1968 against the insanity and barbarism of LBJ’s Vietnam War has long since abandoned the cause of peace. So doing, boomers have acquiesced in the final ascendancy of the Warfare State, which grew like topsy once the US became the world’s sole superpower after the Soviet Union slithered off the pages of history in 1991.

Yet there is a reason why the end of the 77-year world war which incepted with the "guns of August" in 1914 did not enable the world to resume the status quo ante of relative peace and prosperous global capitalism.

To wit, the hoary ideology of American exceptionalism and the Indispensable Nation was also, ironically, liberated from the shackles of cold war realism when the iron curtain came tumbling down.

Consequently, it burst into a quest for unadulterated global hegemony. In short order (under Bush the Elder and the Clintons) Washington morphed into the Imperial City, and became a beehive not only of militarism, but of an endless complex of think-tanks, NGOs, advisories and consultancies, "law firms", lobbies and racketeers.

The unspeakable prosperity of Washington flows from that Imperial beehive. And it is the Indispensable Nation meme that provides the political adhesive that binds the Imperial City to the work of Empire and to provisioning the massive fiscal appetites of the Warfare State.

Needless to say, Empire is a terrible thing because it is the health of the state and the profound enemy of capitalist prosperity and constitutional liberty.

It thrives and metastasizes by abandoning the republican verities of nonintervention abroad and peaceful commerce with all the nations of the world in favor of the self-appointed role of global policeman. Rather than homeland defense, the policy of Empire is that of international busybody, military hegemon and brutal enforcer of Washington’s writs, sanctions, red lines and outlawed regimes.

There is nothing more emblematic of that betrayal of republican non-interventionism than the sundry hot spots which dog the Empire today. These include the Ukraine/Crimea confrontation with Russia, the regime change fiasco in Syria, the US sponsored genocide in Yemen, the failed, bloody 17-year occupation of Afghanistan, the meddling of the US Seventh Fleet in the South China Sea, and, most especially, the swiftly intensifying contretemps in Iran.

May 17, 2018

As originally conceived, the Trump-Kim meeting was just a chance to get together and perhaps strike up a mutually respectful relationship that could then lead to more fruitful discussions down the line. But once Trump's men got ahold of it, they turned it into something far different. Basically, they made sure that it would be Trump talking down to Kim and making him kowtow in return. Thus the US is incapable of making friends first and then conducting business later. They want to set up the relationship first putting Kim in a subservient position because after all we are the United States and he's, well, he's just some two bit dictator albeit one with nuclear weapons.

The US has become the world's bully and the Trump-Kim meeting was to be no exception despite Trump's initial willingness to just have at it with no preconditions. His national security advisor, John Bolton, was having none of it. So Kim, knowing this, will probably not go along with the meeting because, after all, he is not going to take any shit from the President of the United States or anybody else. Peace between North and South Korea does not require US approval. What is the US going to do - sanction South Korea if they make peace? No, President Moon, you can't make peace without out approval!

What if North and South Korea made peace forming one country. It's like Barack Obama said, to paraphrase, "There is not one North Korea and one South Korea, there is only the UNITED State of Korea." What would or could the US do if they were left totally out of the peace process? Nothing. The US could be told to take their soldiers and get the heck unceremoniously out of Korea period. And Kim would keep his friggin' nuclear weapons or give them to China adding to China's nuclear stockpile, in return for China taking Korea under its umbrella. It could happen.

The US fighting communism by stopping the communist Chinese at the 38th parallel has become a joke, an anachronism. Who even believes that any more? It's like the European war that was fought over a pail of water and then many years later they couldn't even remember what they were fighting about. Anyway as Nietsche famously said, "A good war halloweth any cause." I'm sure Hitler agreed with those sentiments.

Seriously, what if Kim came out and said, "Forget the US. I want to make peace with President Moon, and we will take up the nuclear issue at a later date. We want China, not the US, to broker the deal." The US is not all up in arms about China's nuclear weapons so why doesn't Kim give his to China while still maintaining some control over them. I'm sure the situation is finessable, and the Korean situation is normalizable. Trump already envisioned being able to reduce costs by getting the US military out of Korea. He could reduce them a lot more by getting the roughly 1000 US military bases out of other parts of the world as well.

May 15, 2018

Trump promised to rein in drug prices. It was his only sensible campaign promise.

But the plan he announced Friday does little but add another battering ram to his ongoing economic war against America’s allies.

He calls it “American patients first,” and takes aim at what he calls “foreign freeloading.” The plan will pressure foreign countries to relax their drug price controls.

America’s trading partners “need to pay more because they’re using socialist price controls, market access controls, to get unfair pricing,” said Alex Azar, Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, who, perhaps not incidentally, was a former top executive at the drug maker Eli Lilly and Company.

By this tortured logic, if other nations allow drug companies to charge whatever they want, U.S. drug companies will then lower prices in the United States.

This is nonsensical. It would just mean more profits for U.S. drug companies. (Revealingly, the stock prices of U.S. pharmaceutical companies rose after Trump announced his plan.)

While it’s true that Americans spend far more on medications per person than do citizens in any other rich country – even though Americans are no healthier – that’s not because other nations freeload on American drug companies’ research.

Big Pharma in America spends more on advertising and marketing than it does on research – often tens of millions to promote a single drug.

The U.S. government supplies much of the research Big Pharma relies on through the National Institutes of Health. This is a form of corporate welfare that no other industry receives.

American drug companies also spend hundreds of millions lobbying the government. Last year alone, their lobbying tab came to $171.5 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

That’s more than oil and gas, insurance, or any other American industry. It’s more than the formidable lobbying expenditures of America’s military contractors. Big Pharma spends tens of millions more on campaign expenditures.

They spend so much on politics in order to avoid price controls, as exist in most other nations, and other government attempts to constrain their formidable profits.

For example, in 2003, Big Pharma got a U.S. law prohibiting the government from using its considerable bargaining clout under Medicare and Medicaid to negotiate lower drug prices. Other nations with big healthcare plans routinely negotiate lower drug prices.

During his campaign Trump promised to reverse this law. But the plan he revealed Friday doesn’t touch it. Trump’s plan seeks only to make it easier for private health insurers to negotiate better deals for Medicare beneficiaries.

In reality, private health insurers don’t have anywhere near the clout of Medicare and Medicaid – which was the whole point of Big Pharma’s getting Congress to ban such negotiations in the first place.

In the last few years, U.S. drug companies have also blocked Americans from getting low-cost prescription drug from Canada, using the absurd argument that Americans can’t rely on the safety of drugs coming from our northern neighbor – whose standards are at least as high as ours.

Trump’s new plan doesn’t change this, either.

To put all this another way, when Americans buy drugs in the United States, they really buy a package of advertising, marketing, and political influence-peddling. Consumers in other nations don’t pay these costs. Which explains a big part of why drug prices are lower abroad. Trump’s so-called plan to lower drug prices disregards this reality.

Trump’s plan nibbles at the monopoly power of U.S. pharmaceutical companies, but doesn’t deal with the central fact that their patents are supposed to run only twenty years but they’ve developed a host of strategies to keep patents going beyond then.

One is to make often insignificant changes in their patented drugs that are enough to trigger new patents and thereby prevent pharmacists from substituting cheaper generic versions.

Before its patent expired on Namenda, its widely used drug to treat Alzheimer’s, Forest Labs announced it would stop selling the existing tablet form of in favor of new extended-release capsules called Namenda XR. Even though Namenda XR was just a reformulated version of the tablet, the introduction prevented generic versions from being introduced.

Other nations don’t allow drug patents to be extended on such flimsy grounds. Trump’s plan doesn’t touch this ploy.

Another tactic used by U.S. drug companies has been to sue generics to prevent them from selling their cheaper versions, then settle the cases by paying the generics to delay introducing those cheaper versions.

Such “pay-for-delay” agreements are illegal in other nations, but antitrust enforcement hasn’t laid a finger on them in America – and Trump doesn’t mention them although they cost Americans an estimated $3.5 billion a year.

Even after their patents have expired, U.S. drug companies continue to aggressively advertise their brands so patients will ask their doctors for them instead of the generic versions. Many doctors comply.

Other nations don’t allow direct advertising of prescription drugs – another reason why prices are lower there and higher here. Trump’s plan is silent on this, too. (Trump suggests drug advertisers should be required to post the prices of their drugs, which they’re already expert at obscuring.)

If Trump were serious about lowering drug prices he’d have to take on the U.S. drug manufacturers.

But Trump doesn’t want to take on Big Pharma. As has been typical for him, rather than confronting the moneyed interests in America he chooses mainly to blame foreigners.

The next election for President of the US is only two years away, folks. Just like Trump has endeavored to undo everything Obama did, If a Democrat is elected in 2020, he or she can undo everything Trump has done. This would include rejoining the Paris climate change accords and rejoining the Iran nuclear deal if the other signatories can hold that deal together until 2020. So he or she can restore the Obama era changes and make them operative again. Of course the next Republican President can undo all that and go back to Trumpism. Is this any way to run a government? Of course not.

Trump's war on the environment can be changed. Also his war on the poor can be changed. His tax giveaways to the rich can be changed. However, is this back and forth see sawing action by the US a desirable state of affairs? I don't think so. Somewhere along the line the US has to go back to consistency again. Otherwise, you've got two warring factions within one country and no consensus about anything. It's the civil war all over again except without the actual fighting. If the Congress ever became functional again, some of these Presidential maneuvers could be cast in cement, I suppose. Then it would take an act of Congress to reverse them.

What is an executive order?

An executive order is a "directive by the president to the officers and officials of the executive branch," Columbia law professor and former Associate Counsel to President Jimmy Carter, Philip Bobbitt told Business Insider.

While the president can't order private citizens to specifically do something, they are still affected by executive orders insofar as their interactions with executive officials. "They do have the effect of law," Bobbitt explained.

Can an executive order be reversed?

Both the legislative and judicial branches have the power to reverse an executive order.

If the president issues an executive order in accordance with a law passed by the legislative branch and Congress disagrees, they can pass a bill clarifying the law. However, the president has the power of the veto, in which case Congress would have to override the veto with a two-thirds majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

If, however, an executive order pertains to the president's independent constitutional responsibilities, then only the courts can reverse it. Bobbitt uses the example of Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order issued by Abraham Lincoln in accordance with his power as commander-in-chief. While Congress did not have the power to override that order, the courts could have declared it unconstitutional.

More recently, the courts blocked President Obama's 2014 executive action to shield millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation and allow them to work legally in the US. The 2016 Supreme Court decision was deadlocked (only eight justices voted as there was a seat left vacant by Justice Scalia's death earlier that year). The tie meant that a lower court's decision that Obama likely exceeded his executive authority stopped the plan from being implemented.

So Trumpism isn't the end of the world as we've known it. It's just important that the ignorant know nothings that elected Trump not be allowed to run the country and vote their preferences into office at every election. We need more progressive people in office, and the only way to get them there is for more progressive people to vot.

Icahn is not exactly a hardship case. According to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index, his net worth is $21.8 billion. Over the last four decades as a corporate raider, Icahn has pushed CEOs to cut payrolls, abandon their communities, and outsource jobs abroad in order to generate more money for him and other investors.

In 1985, after winning control of the now-defunct Trans World Airlines, Icahn stripped its assets, pocketed nearly $500 million in profits, and left the airline more than $500 million in debt. Former TWA chair C.E. Meyer Jr. called Icahn “one of the greediest men on earth.”

No single person has done more to harm America’s working class than Carl Icahn. Not surprisingly, Icahn was a Trump backer from the start, and has benefited immensely from Trump’s presidency.

When Trump first talked with Scott Pruitt about running the EPA, Trump told Pruitt to meet with Icahn. As Icahn later recounted, “I told Donald that [Pruitt] is somebody who will do away with many of the problems at the EPA.”

Trump then made Icahn his special regulatory adviser, until lawmakers raised concerns about potential conflicts of interest.

Icahn has found other ways to make money off the Trump presidency. Days before Trump announced hefty tariffs on foreign-made steel, Icahn sold off $31.3 million in stock he owned in the Manitowoc Company, a manufacturer of steel cranes. After Trump’s announcement, the company’s shares tumbled.

Icahn says he had no inside knowledge of Trump’s move, but why should anyone believe him? The Trump presidency is awash in conflicts of interest, lies, payoffs to friends, insider deals, and utter disdain for the public.

Icahn’s steel deal was chickenfeed relative to the billions he’ll pocket courtesy of Trump’s tax cut. Icahn is said to have spent $150 million lobbying for it, which makes it one of his best investments so far.

Rubbish. Low-income Americans are already working hard, many paying half their monthly incomes in rent.

The Trump administration is also allowing states to demand that Medicaid recipients work, although there’s no evidence Medicaid deters people from working. In fact, many low-income Americans are able to work only because they have access to health care via Medicaid.

Trump and his enablers on Capitol Hill are proposing that people receiving food stamp work at least twenty hours a week. Yet over 40 million Americans – including many children and disabled – are already struggling with hunger, and food stamps average only $1.40 per person per meal.

In contrast to their argument that the poor need less help in order to work harder, Trump and his enablers justify regulatory and tax handouts to Carl Icahn and his ilk by arguing the rich need more in order to work harder.

Corporations have been using savings from the tax cut to buy back their shares of stock at a record pace. Icahn has been among the biggest investors pushing them to do so because buybacks raise stock prices, thereby putting even more money in his pocket.

It’s doubtful Icahn will use the savings from his “financial hardship” waiver to invest in more oil refineries. Profit margins in refining are plummeting.

In reality, Trumponomics is a thin veneer of an excuse for giving America’s rich – already richer than ever – whatever they want, while sticking it to everyone else.

We are rapidly becoming a nation of just two groups. The first are those without any voice, vulnerable to real financial hardship, who are losing whatever meager assistance they had. This includes many white working-class Trump supporters.

The second are those like Carl Icahn – powerful enough to extract benefits from Trump and the GOP by claiming they need such incentives in order to invest. But their neediness is a hoax, and the only significant investments they’re making are pay-offs to politicians.

Far more Americans belong to the first group than to the second. The question is when they will realize it, and vote accordingly.

"Trump’s insistence that that the agreement is somehow advantageous to Iran and would allow it to develop nuclear weapons is completely ludicrous." (Photo: AP/Carolyn Kaster)

The Trump Administration’s decision to pull the United States out of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—the landmark nuclear agreement between Iran and the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, China, and the United States—strikes a dangerous blow against arms control and international security and even more firmly establishes the United States as a rogue nation.

This is a victory for Iranian hardliners, who opposed the treaty. They argued against destroying billions of dollars’ worth of nuclear facilities and material in return for the lifting of debilitating sanctions, because the United States could not be trusted to lift the sanctions as promised. That, in the end, is exactly what happened.

Now Trump’s decision will make it virtually impossible for North Korea or any other country to trust the United States to keep its treaty commitments and thereby sabotage future arms control negotiations.

The Iran pact is supported by virtually every country in the world. The vast majority of those in the U.S. national security establishment, current and retired, have supported it, as have the vast majority of nuclear scientists and policy experts. Even within Israel, there is strong support among intelligence and defense officials.

Trump argued that the treaty did nothing to curb Iran’s intervention in Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere. But that was never its intention. Other such agreements seek to limit countries’ nuclear ambitions, not their broader geopolitical ambitions.

And Trump’s accusations of Iranian cheating are groundless. Indeed, his own CIA director and Director of National Intelligence have both acknowledged in recent weeks that Iran is in full compliance with the agreement, as has the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Accusations of Iranian cheating by the rightwing Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week referred back to Iran’s long-acknowledged cover-up of a nascent weapons program more than fifteen years ago. This is in no way a new revelation, or relevant to the current agreement.

In short, the pact makes it physically impossible for Iran to build a single atomic bomb.

Similarly, Trump’s insistence that that the agreement is somehow advantageous to Iran and would allow it to develop nuclear weapons is completely ludicrous.

The agreement reduced Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile by 98 percent and restricts the level of enrichment to 3.67 percent. Given that an enrichment level of 90 percent is needed to build a nuclear bomb, this makes it impossible for Iran’s uranium to be weaponized.

Under the deal, Iran also reduced its number of centrifuges to a little over 5,000, far below the number that would be needed to enrich uranium to anything close to that level. It prevented the commissioning of the Arak reactor, capable of producing plutonium, and restricts research and development activities in other facilities. And it cut off all of Iran’s other potential pathways to obtaining a nuclear weapon.

In short, the pact makes it physically impossible for Iran to build a single atomic bomb.

In addition, the agreement imposes the one of the most rigorous inspection regimes in history. International inspectors monitor Iran’s nuclear program at every stage: uranium mining and milling, conversion, enrichment, fuel manufacturing, nuclear reactors, and spent fuel, as well as any site—military or civilian—they consider suspicious.

And if Iran were to violate any aspect of this agreement, sanctions would automatically snap back into place.

Historically, most agreements on nuclear weapons have required some sort of reciprocity. But none of Iran’s nuclear-armed neighbors—Israel, Pakistan or India—are required to eliminate or reduce their weapons or open their nuclear facilities to inspections, even though all three are currently violating U.N. Security Council resolutions regarding their nuclear programs. And none of the other nuclear powers, including the United States, are required to reduce their arsenals, either.

Trump and his Republican backers have long opposed efforts to ease tensions between the United States and Iran—especially any effort that might undermine excuses for going to war against that oil-rich nation. Iran, shackled by the 2015 agreement, is no threat to the United States. Iran’s support for extremist groups, its human rights violations, its backing of repressive allies, and its other violations of international norms—while certainly wrong—are no worse than those committed by key U.S. regional allies.

The “threat” from Iran is that it is a regional power that has dared to challenge the United States’ hegemonic ambitions in the greater Middle East. For advocates of “full spectrum dominance,” as first articulated by the administration of George W. Bush in 2002, any such efforts to undermine U.S. hegemony are simply unacceptable.

Now Trump is free to undercut the Iranian economy by resuming comprehensive U.S. sanctions and forcing companies in other countries to avoid doing business with Iran by threatening to deny them trade and investment opportunities with the United States.

Trump’s strategy appears to encourage the Iranians to resume their nuclear program in order to provoke a crisis that would give the United States an excuse to go to war.

MSNBC political analyst Elise Jordan offered a dour prediction for the future of President Donald Trump's decision on Tuesday to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal.

Fulfilling a deeply contentious campaign promise, Trump made the announcement from the White House that the United States will no longer be a party to the multilateral agreement that was designed to keep the Iran regime from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Aside from Israel, the United States' allies almost universally opposed the withdrawal, and many feared that China or Russia will step in to lead the way forward with Iran.

"I think that we're going to look back on today as the most isolationist move made by a U.S. president in the ... post World War II era," Jordan said. "I think this is a very huge move in terms of the United States literally going at it alone."

She continued: "We are truly just giving the middle finger to our closest allies."

Trump's taking the US out of the Iran nuclear deal, despite objections from every other signatory to the deal, means that the US is becoming irrelevant in world affairs. His withdrawal from the Paris climate change accords despite almost every other nation being a part of it, was his first big mistake. Now this. Iran may stay in the nuclear deal just because the EU, Russia and China may still be part of it. US sanctions are becoming less meaningful, especially if the rest of the world ignores them and continues to trade with Iran.

Supposedly, Trump will put sanctions on any other country that does business with Iran. That will never happen unless Trump wants to start a trade war with the whole world. If other countries continue to do business with Iran, Trump's sanctions will be moot. They will be ineffective. They also only apply to doing business in dollars. China and Russia could step up and trade with Iran in other currencies. The EU may break with the US also. Trump has just basically stepped into a huge cow flop. Will the rest of the world including US "allies" stand up to him?

The US is becoming a rogue nation under Trump. He expects the rest of the world to kowtow to him. I think the rest of the world will challenge Trump and go on about normalizing business with Iran. California will also stand up to Trump about tailpipe emissions. California wants to reduce them; Trump wants to increase them so the fossil fuel industry can sell more gas and oil, polluting the atmosphere even more.

While the rest of the world including longstanding US allies wants to do the right thing, Trump and his toxic base only want to take the US in a downward spiral based on ignorance and hatred.

May 08, 2018

"This proposal is a shameful betrayal of children. This administration and congressional Republicans passed a massive tax giveaway to their donors and big corporations, and now they want vulnerable children to pay for it."

President Donald Trump, flanked by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) and House Speaker Paul Ryan applaud in the Rose Garden of the White House. (Photo: Evan Vucci/AP)

Months after ramming through deficit-exploding tax cuts for billionaires and large corporations, President Donald Trump and the GOP are now looking for programs to slash to make up the difference—and they're starting with children's healthcare.

According to a Washington Post report late Monday, Trump is "sending a plan to Congress that calls for stripping more than $15 billion in previously approved spending," $7 billion of which would come from the broadly popular Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP).

"Not much surprises me anymore in American politics. But this is despicable on every level," wrote Rep. Barbara Lee in response to Trump's proposed cuts. "But this is despicable on every level."

The #GOPTaxScam gave a trillion dollars to billionaires & massive corporations. Now, Republicans want to gut the Children’s Health Insurance Program to pay for it.

Described by one Trump administration official as "the biggest rescission request that has ever been sent to Congress," the proposal needs a mere majority in both the House and Senate to pass.

Speaking with the Post on Monday, Rep. Mark Walker (R-N.C.) said the Trump administration has assured Republicans that this package of spending cuts is just the first of many.

As the Post reported, CHIP and is just one over over 30 programs the White House is moving to slash.

"This proposal is a shameful betrayal of children," Sen. Bob Casey (D-Penn.) wrote in response to reports of Trump's proposal. "This administration and congressional Republicans passed a massive tax giveaway to their donors and big corporations, and now they want vulnerable children to pay for it."

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May 04, 2018

Trump lied about paying hush money to Stormy Daniels right before the election, and then his attorney lied that he had paid Stormy out of his own pocket. So why does Rudy Giuliani come out with the truth right now? Oh well, the election's over. Russia may or may not have helped Trump get elected. It is a fait accompli at this point. As Hillary famously said, "At this point what difference does it make?" Rudy Giuliani thinks he can lawyerly craft an explanation which doesn't make Trump's paying money to a porn star and then lying about it somehow not illegal.

Trump paid Cohen a retainer and this retainer was not for Cohen's legal services - maybe some of it was - but this retainer was also a slush fund out of which Cohen was supposed to pay off porn stars and anyone else who got in Trump's way. The fact of the matter is that Trump's lying helped get him elected. If his tryst with Stormy Daniels had come to light right before the election, it might have turned off enough Trump voters that Hillary would have won. But none of this is illegal according to Giuliani as long as Trump didn't use campaign funds to pay off Stormy. Well, obviously, Trump is not so strapped for cash that he had to use campaign funds to pay off a porn star. Let's focus on the campaign funds issue says Giuliani and not the elephant in the room - Trump had sex with a porn star and then lied about it.

This whole business with Trump, his lying and his questionable behavior with women, has not evidently turned off the religious right. They embrace Trump because he has done some political tweaks which give them some advantages that they've been seeking. They are a bunch of hypocrites who will overlook Trump's sleazy and unChristian behavior to get what they want just like any other interest group. Trump can barely give lip service to religious ideals. It's risible that Trump presided over a so-called National Day of Prayer.

According to Trump, Stormy Daniels and he never had sex. She just wanted to get money so she alleged that they had sex, and Trump had his lawyer pay her off, which is "very common among celebrities and people of wealth", just so she wouldn't claim to the media that they did have sex, which they didn't, and his lawyer did it in such a way that Trump wasn't even aware of it. In other words Trump didn't have sex with Stormy Daniels and his lawyer paid her to keep quiet about it in such a way that Trump knew nothing about it. Trump is totally innocent having not had sex with Stormy Daniels and having no knowledge that his lawyer paid her off so that she wouldn't claim to have had sex with him.

It definitely doesn't pass the smell test, but even if it did, it's not illegal according to Giuliani who can craft lawyerly arguments which, when presented to the right judge and jury, and in particular the Supreme Court who are majority Republicans, will get Trump off the hook. So the most powerful man in the free world can end up doing whatever the hell he wants to and getting away with it because he's the most powerful man in the free world. Morality and ethics don't matter. Just ask the Christian evangelicals. It looks like in this morality play a porn star, who is laughing all the way to the bank, is the good guy and the President of the United States is a liar and an adulturer. God bless America.

May 02, 2018

“It’s nonsense that there’s a beautiful free market in the power industry,” Energy Secretary Rick Perry said last week as he pushed for a government bailout of coal-fired power plants.

Republicans who for years have voted against subsidies for solar and wind power – arguing that the “free market” should decide our energy future – are now eager to have government subsidize coal.

Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is also scrapping rules for disposing coal ash, giving coal producers another big helping hand. As if this weren’t enough, a former coal lobbyist has just become Number Two at the EPA. If Scott Pruitt leaves (a growing possibility), the coal lobbyist will be in charge.

Meanwhile, Trump is imposing a 30 percent tariff on solar panels from China, thereby boosting their cost to American homeowners and utilities. The Trumpsters say this is because China is subsidizing solar.

To Trump and his merry band of climate-change deniers, boosting coal is fine. Helping solar is an unwarranted interference in the free market.

As with so much else, Trump is determined to Take America Backwards Again.

Until about a decade ago, the United States was the world leader in solar energy. Federal tax credits along with state renewable electricity standards helped fuel the boom.

China’s success in solar has inspired China’s new high-tech industrial policy – a $300 billion plan to boost China’s position in other cutting-edge industries, called “Made in China 2025.”

Besides subsidizing these industries, China is also telling foreign (usually American) companies seeking to sell in China that they must make their gadgets in China. As a practical matter this often means American firms must disclose and share their technology with Chinese firms.

“We have a tremendous intellectual property theft situation going on,” said Trump, just before upping the ante and threatening China with $100 billion of tariffs.

China’s theft of intellectual property is troublesome, but the larger issue of China’s industrial policy is not. The United States has an industrial policy, too. We just don’t do it well – and Trump is intent on doing it far worse.

The United States government used to incubate new technologies through the Defense Department, allocating billions of dollars to R&D that spilled over into commercial uses.

April 29, 2018

With the 2018 midterms around the corner, and prospective Democratic candidates already eyeing the 2020 race, the answer is important because it will influence how Democrats campaign.

One explanation focuses on economic hardship. The working class fell for Trump’s economic populism.

A competing explanation – which got a boost this week from a study published by the National Academy of Sciences – dismisses economic hardship, and blames it on whites’ fear of losing status to blacks and immigrants. They were attracted to Trump’s form of identity politics – bigotry.

If Democrats accept the bigotry explanation, they may be more inclined to foster their own identity politics of women, blacks, and Latinos. And they’ll be less inclined to come up with credible solutions to widening inequality and growing economic insecurity.

Yet the truth isn’t found in one explanation or the other. It’s in the interplay between the two.

Certainly many white working class men and women were – and still are – receptive to Trump’s bigotry.

But what made them receptive? Racism and xenophobia aren’t exactly new to American life. Fears of blacks and immigrants have been with us since the founding of the Republic.

What changed was the economy. Since the 1980s the wages and economic prospects of the typical American worker have stagnated. Two-thirds now live paycheck to paycheck, and those paychecks have grown less secure.

Good-paying jobs have disappeared from vast stretches of the land. Despite the official low unemployment rate, millions continue to work part-time who want steady jobs or they’re too discouraged to look for work.

When I was Secretary of Labor in the 1990s, I frequently visited the Rust Belt, Midwest, and South, where blue-collar workers told me they were working harder than ever but getting nowhere.

Meanwhile, all the economy’s gains have gone to the richest ten percent, mostly the top 1 percent. Wealthy individuals and big corporations have, in turn, invested some of those gains into politics.

As a result, big money now calls the shots in Washington – obtaining subsidies, tax breaks, tax loopholes (even Trump promised to close the “carried interest” loophole yet it remains), and bailouts.

The near meltdown of Wall Street in 2008 precipitated a recession that cost millions their jobs, homes, and savings. But the Street got bailed out and not a single Wall Street executive went to jail.

The experience traumatized America. In the two years leading up to the 2016 election, I revisited many of the places I had visited when I was labor secretary. People still complained of getting nowhere, but now they also told me the system was “rigged” against them.

A surprising number said they planned to vote for Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump – the two anti-establishment candidates who promised to “shake up” Washington.

This whole story might have been different had Democrats done more to remedy wage stagnation and widening inequality when they had the chance.

Instead, Bill Clinton was a pro-growth “New Democrat” who opened trade with China, deregulated Wall Street, and balanced the budget. (I still have some painful scars from that time.)

Obama bailed out the banks but not homeowners. Obamacare, while important to the poor, didn’t alleviate the financial stresses on the working class, particularly in states refused to expand Medicaid.

In the 2016 election Hillary Clinton offered a plethora of small-bore policy proposals – all sensible but none big enough to make a difference.

Into this expanding void came Trump’s racism and xenophobia – focusing the cumulative economic rage on scapegoats that had nothing to do with its causes. It was hardly the first time in history a demagogue has used this playbook.

If America doesn’t respond to the calamity that’s befallen the working class, we’ll have Trumps as far as the eye can see.

A few Democrats are getting the message – pushing ambitious ideas like government-guaranteed full employment, single-payer health care, industry-wide collective bargaining, and a universal basic income.

But none has yet offered a way to finance these things, such as a progressive tax on wealth.

Nor have they offered a credible way to get big money out of politics. Even if “Citizens United” isn’t overruled, big money’s influence could be limited with generous public financing of elections, full disclosure of the source of all campaign contributions, and a clampdown on the revolving door between business and government.

Trump isn’t the cause of what’s happened to America. He’s the consequence – the product of years of stagnant wages and big money’s corruption of our democracy.

If they really want to stop Trump and prevent future Trumps, Democrats will need to address these causes of Trump’s rise.

Kim Jong Un says that the Korean peninsula will be free of nuclear weapons. Maybe so, but China is already a nuclear state. Kim could just shift his nuclear capability over to China under whose protection North Korea has been for years. China has been the main support system for North Korea allowing Kim to circumvent US sanctions. The geopolitical implications of a united Korea are enormous. China and a united Korea will probably do an end run around US sanctions which is the only way the US can have any control or power in the region other than its military which will become increasingly irrelevant.

China, the world's largest economy by some measures, is increasing its power and prestige all over the Eurasian land mass with its Belt and Road initiative. It is also becoming irked at the nascent US-China trade war initiated by President Trump. It has an interest in creating peace between the two Koreas and seeing them become a part of the normal world of nations, especially the growing Asian component. It will do it in such a way as to not forestall trade among the world's nations. It does not want to jeopardize South Korea's favorable import export relations with the rest of the world, but in such a way that North Korea will be able to grow and enhance its currently pathetic economy. Pulling North Korea into an acceptable nation for the other nations of the world to do business with is only in China's best interests.

The US, meanwhile, is losing prestige all over the world because of the antics of President Trump who is turning the US into an insular nation bereft of commonly held scientific knowledge. While most of the world is on board with an acknowledgment of climate change due to global warming, Trump has led the US down the rat hole of ignorance. He is at risk of making the US a laughing stock or a pariah as far as other nations are concerned. He has alienated other nations with his bellicosity. His picks for department heads have been ludicrous and fraught with Keystone Cops incompetence.

Trump is pulling a Chief Inspector Dreyfuss routine. As the Inspector tried to take credit for Clouseau's solving of the Pink Panther case, Trump is trying to take credit for solving the case of peace between the two Koreas. But they can make peace even without Trump's involvement and that is surely what is happening. In the long run South Korea will be absorbed into the Chinese sphere rather than North Korea being absorbed into the US sphere. A united Korea will become an economic and political powerhouse.

While US debt continues to skyrocket thanks to Trump's and Ryan's tax cuts mainly benefiting the wealthy, sovereign wealth funds all over the world, to whom the US owes money, will start withdrawing their financial support of US debt. This will force the US either to curtail its military expansionism or to curtail social security and Medicare. It depends on the mindset of the nation. If the Trump clan wins, the US will become a totally militarized nation but with waning influence in the world and a nation without any semblance of a safety net for its citizens. If the Blue State clan wins, the US will turn its attention towards enhancing the lives of its people instead of military adventurism abroad. So far the Trump clan is winning, but as Trump says, we'll see what happens.

April 24, 2018

The pundits are all saying that Trump is a naive negotiator. He won't make North Korea give enough concessions. So what? If he can get a peace agreement between North and South Korea and end the Korean war, it will be a major accomplishment. If that results in a detente, if American troops then come home, that will be a major accomplishment. But it's not what the American military establishment wants. Why? Because they want to maintain a presence in Korea. They don't want peace. They want South Korea to remain an American military garrison. Why just think. If the Americans were to pull out, that would leave Korea within the Chinese sphere of influence. Quelle horreur!

So the American approach is if you just back down, Kim Jong Un, and if you just bend over, and if you do everything we say, if you totally emasculate yourself, then maybe, just maybe we might make peace with you. Of course then you would have to accept an American military presence in North Korea as well as South Korea, you would have to report to us on your knees, you would have to let American corporations come in and take over your country, you would have to pledge your soul to capitalism and the free market system. In short you would have to become an American outpost and a bulwark against China.

I believe the correct word is kowtow. Experienced American negotiators want Kim to kowtow to us Americans. Trump doesn't seem to be so interested in having them kowtow. If he can pull this off, I will have to readjust my opinion of Trump which up to now has been very negative. Let's also see what the Mueller investigation reveals. So far not very much. Probably had more to do with Trump's business dealings than anything else. Of course I can't forgive Trump for pulling out of the Paris climate change agreement and putting all these weenies like Scot Pruitt in charge of various departments that their sole aim is to destroy. Also the Republican "tax reform" which will likely destroy the financial integrity of the US dollar while driving even more people into poverty and homelessness.

I'm just longing for the good old days when even the poverty stricken had a roof over their heads. Now there's the poverty stricken which are a step above the homeless. Huxley's dystopian vision of a Brave New World is coming true. The alphas are the billionaires. The betas are the millionaires. The gammas are the shrinking middle class. The deltas are the poverty stricken and the epsilons are the homeless.

April 18, 2018

“It’s nonsense that there’s a beautiful free market in the power industry,” Energy Secretary Rick Perry said last week as he pushed for a government bailout of coal-fired power plants.

Republicans who for years have voted against subsidies for solar and wind power – arguing that the “free market” should decide our energy future – are now eager to have government subsidize coal.

Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is also scrapping rules for disposing coal ash, giving coal producers another big helping hand. As if this weren’t enough, a former coal lobbyist has just become Number Two at the EPA. If Scott Pruitt leaves (a growing possibility), the coal lobbyist will be in charge.

Meanwhile, Trump is imposing a 30 percent tariff on solar panels from China, thereby boosting their cost to American homeowners and utilities. The Trumpsters say this is because China is subsidizing solar.

To Trump and his merry band of climate-change deniers, boosting coal is fine. Helping solar is an unwarranted interference in the free market.

As with so much else, Trump is determined to Take America Backwards Again.

Until about a decade ago, the United States was the world leader in solar energy. Federal tax credits along with state renewable electricity standards helped fuel the boom.

China’s success in solar has inspired China’s new high-tech industrial policy – a $300 billion plan to boost China’s position in other cutting-edge industries, called “Made in China 2025.”

Besides subsidizing these industries, China is also telling foreign (usually American) companies seeking to sell in China that they must make their gadgets in China. As a practical matter this often means American firms must disclose and share their technology with Chinese firms.

“We have a tremendous intellectual property theft situation going on,” said Trump, just before upping the ante and threatening China with $100 billion of tariffs.

China’s theft of intellectual property is troublesome, but the larger issue of China’s industrial policy is not. The United States has an industrial policy, too. We just don’t do it well – and Trump is intent on doing it far worse.

The United States government used to incubate new technologies through the Defense Department, allocating billions of dollars to R&D that spilled over into commercial uses.

Out of this came the Internet, new materials technologies, and solar cells that helped propel the United States into space – and, not incidentally, seeded the commercial solar industry.

America’s high-tech companies have continued to depend on government indirectly – feeding off breakthroughs from America’s research universities, along with the engineers and scientists those universities train (think of Stanford and Silicon Valley). Much of this research and training is financed by the U.S. government.

Trump’s original budget would have slashed funding of the National Science Foundation and related research by nearly 30 percent. Fortunately, Congress didn’t go along.

Meanwhile, federal, state, and local governments in the United States spend over $2 trillion a year on goods and services, making them together the biggest purchasers in the world. Due to “buy American” laws, about 60 percent of the content they purchase must be made in America.

As Steven Greenhouse points out in April’s American Prospect, a few state and local governments are taking a page out of China’s book – luring foreign firms to the United States to make high-tech products that are good for the environment and good for American workers.

As one example, Los Angeles has contracted with BYD, a Chinese company that’s the world’s leading producer of zero-emissions electric buses, to make its buses in California.

BYD’s huge factory north of Los Angeles has already created six hundred well-paid unionized jobs and two hundred white collar jobs.

America has always had an industrial policy. The real question is whether it’s forward-looking (the Internet, solar, zero-emissions buses) or backwards (coal).

Trump wants a backwards industrial policy. That’s not surprising, given that everything else he and his administration are doing is designed to take us backwards.

“Our president must embody respect and adhere to the values that are at the core of this country,” Comey told Stephanopoulos. “The most important being truth. This president is not able to do that. He is morally unfit to be president.”

Turning first to Trump’s defence of a white supremacists’ march, he said: “A person who sees moral equivalence in Charlottesville, who talks about and treats women like they’re pieces of meat, who lies constantly about matters big and small and insists the American people believe it, that person’s not fit to be president of the United States, on moral grounds.”

Replying to a question about whether Trump had committed an obstruction of justice, Comey said “it’s possible”.

“There’s certainly some evidence of obstruction of justice,” Comey said. But for the president to follow through on threats to fire special counsel Robert Mueller, Comey said, would “set off alarm bells that this is his most serious attack yet on the rule of law”.

In his book, Comey compares Trump to a mafia don and challenges the president’s character, honesty and commitment to public service.

Sitting in his Virginia living room across from Stephanopolous, Comey answered questions about the Trump team’s response to Russian election tampering, about his handling of the Clinton emails investigation and his personal impressions of the president-elect.

April 14, 2018

The petulant adolescent in the White House – who has replaced most of the adults around him with raging sycophants and has demoted his chief of staff, John Kelly, to lapdog – lacks adequate supervision.

Before, he was merely petty and vindictive. He’d tweet nasty things about people he wanted to humiliate, like former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick.

Now his vindictiveness has turned cruel. After smearing FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe with unfounded allegations that he lied to investigators, the new Trump made sure McCabe was fired just days before he would have been eligible for a pension after more than twenty-one years of service.

Now his xenophobia has turned belligerent. He’s sending thousands of National Guard troops to the Mexican border, even though illegal border crossings are at a record low.

And he’s starting a trade war against China.

China has been expropriating American intellectual property for years. But Trump isn’t even trying to negotiate a way out of this jam or build a coalition of other trading partners to pressure China. He’s just upping the ante – and, not incidentally, causing the stock market to go nuts.

But the most dangerous thing about the new Trump is his increased attacks on American democracy itself.

Start with a free press. Before, he just threw rhetorical bombshells at the Washington Post, CNN, and other outlets that criticized him.

Now he’s trying to penalize them financially, while bestowing benefits on outlets that praise him.

Last week he demanded that Amazon, the corporation headed by the man who owns the Washington Post, pay higher postal rates and more taxes, and that the Post should register as Amazon’s lobbyist. Amazon stock wilted under the attack.

They’re absurd charges. Amazon collects and pays state sales taxes on its products, and the Postal Service is losing money because of the decline in first-class mail, not package deliveries.

Presumably Amazon can take care of itself. Trump’s attack was intended as a warning to other companies with media connections that they’d better not mess with him

Trump is trying to hurt CNN, too. The day after the Justice Department moved to block AT&T’s purchase of Time-Warner, parent of CNN, he said the deal wasn’t “good for the country.” Few missed the connection.

We’re entering a new and more dangerous phase of Trump’s “divide and conquer” strategy, splitting the nation into warring camps – with him as the most divisive issue.

Even Trump’s tweets have become more brazenly divisive. Last week he called his predecessor “Cheatin’ Obama.” When was the last time you heard a president of the United States disparage another president?

He’s more determined than ever to convince supporters that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is in cahoots with Democrats and the FBI to unseat him.

This might give him some protection if Trump decides to fire Mueller, or if Mueller’s investigation turns up evidence that Trump collaborated with Russia to win the election, and Congress moves to impeach him.

“Try to impeach him, just try it,” warned Roger Stone, Trump’s former campaign adviser, last summer. “You will have a spasm of violence in this country, an insurrection like you’ve never seen.”

But Trump’s strategy might just as easily extend beyond Mueller. What happens if in 2020 a rival candidate accumulates more electoral votes, but Trump accuses him or her of cheating, and refuses to step down?

“He’s now president for life,” Trump recently said of Xi Jinping, adding “maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.” Some thought Trump was joking. I’m not so sure.

Democracies require leaders who understand that their primary responsibility is to protect the institutions and processes democracy depends on. The new Trump seems intent on maintaining his power, whatever it takes.

Democracies also require enough social trust that citizens regard those they disagree with as being worthy of an equal say, so they’ll accept political outcomes they dislike. The new Trump is destroying that trust.

Trump untethered isn’t just a more petty, vindictive, and belligerent version of his former self. He’s also more willing to sacrifice American democracy to his own ends. Which makes him more dangerous than ever.

MSNBC anchor Ali Velshi contemplates President Donald Trump's best military options during a news segment on Wednesday. The options presented ranged from a "small strike" to "more damaging strikes" to "strikes on Russian and Iranian bases" inside Syria, but never considered this option for his viewers: no strikes at all. (Photo: MSNBC/Screenshot)

With America's major corporate cable outlets—particularly so-called liberal networks like MSNBC—continuing to uncritically provide generals and lawmakers a massive platform to beat the drums of war as President Donald Trump inches closer to launching a military attack on Syria, critics have concluded that the U.S. media has clearly learned nothing from the crucial role it played in cheerleading for the Bush administration's catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003.

"It's incredible how readily the cable news channels have politicians on pushing for war in Syria with almost no questions asked about how disastrous it might be or the so-called evidence." —Cenk Uyger, The Young Turks

"It's incredible how readily the cable news channels have politicians on pushing for war in Syria with almost no questions asked about how disastrous it might be or the so-called evidence," Uyger added. "They pretended to learn lessons from Iraq but have actually learned nothing."

As media critic Simon Maloy lamented in a column at Media Matters, the behavior of much of the corporate media "indicates how alarmingly comfortable much of the mainstream press is with the idea that the president can just up and decide to initiate military hostilities whenever, wherever, and for whatever reason—even when there is no actual reason at all."

Almost entirely absent from the prevailing discussion of Syria on America's cable networks in recent days—which one journalist described as "a parade of one war hawk after another"—has been any mention of the alternatives to military action.

Exemplifying this total exclusion of peaceful options was a segment on Wednesday by MSNBC's Ali Velshi, who provided his viewers with a quick rundown of the possible actions the president could take in Syria—from "small strike" to "more damaging strikes" to "strikes on Russian and Iranian bases"—without ever mentioning one major choice: no airstrikes at all.

Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, argued on Twitter that the corporate media's relentless elevation of pro-war voices since the Assad regime was accused of carrying out a chemical attack on Sunday is "making John Bolton's wildest dreams come true."

As Common Dreamsreported, Bolton officially took over as Trump's national security adviser on Monday as the White House weighed whether to strike Syria militarily.

"In his first week on the job, everyone is calling for a new war," Timm noted.

Pundits and the media are making John Bolton’s wildest dreams come true: in his first week on the job, everyone is calling for a new war.

With outlets like CNN and MSNBC leaving a massive vacuum by refusing to raise even the most basic questions about the Trump administration's push for military action in Syria, Tucker Carlson of Fox News has been one of the few cable hosts to criticize the rationale for war and offer a platform to an anti-war voice.

In an appearance on Carlson's primetime show Tuesday night, The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald argued that it is the "standard tactic" of the corporate media to smear opponents of U.S. wars in an effort to shut down legitimate questions about the rush toward military action.

"This climate arises that you're just supposed to cheer when it comes time to drop bombs on other countries, not ask whether there's evidence to justify it, not ask whether it will do any good, not ask whether it will kill any civilians," Greenwald said. "And if you do ask one of those questions it means you're on the side of America's enemies. It's an incredibly authoritarian tactic that gets used to suppress debate."

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Start bombing Russians in some Shithole Country with No Strategic Value for the US after Said Russians Have Just Won Proxy War for Some Tinhorn Dictator

The US, who likes to preach to the world about human rights and moral ethics, having just supported Saudi Arabia in killing Houthi children in Yemen, is outraged about a chemical attack in Syria which it alleges was carried out by said tinhorn dictator. So nutcase dictator Trump says, "We'll see what we shall see." Having lost the war in Syria, the US is preparing to restart it again. Only this time Syria is loaded with Russian military men and equipment. What could go wrong here?

The US has no moral superiority, chemical attack or no chemical attack. It has ravaged the whole Middle East in a process by which the outcome was determined to be that the US' enemy, Iran, was handed the reins in the Middle East. Funny, you fight a war the outcome of which is that some third party, namely your enemy, comes out the winner. Smart strategic thinking here. Then thinking that it's not too late to restart a war you've already lost, you return to the fray led by a nutcase President and a shithole-destroying Secretary of Defense.

Since Obama did not cross the red line he projected with his laser pointer, Trump wants to have a go at it. His turn to get embroiled in the Middle East, this time fighting Russians as well. Makes sense. The US lost the war once. Maybe this time will be different. The first time you had a rational man as President; this time you have a looney tunes. But Lockheed Martin needs the business. Might as well crank up the war expenditures especially after you've given the US billionaires a helluva tax break which is in the process of running up the US budget deficit by a trillion dollars a year. Question is: who is going to buy all that US debt? Or maybe the question is who is going to dump US Treasuries creating a real financial crisis?

The US has lost whatever moral stature it had in the world under President Obama and whatever residual moral stature it had after WW II. Now it is just seen as the world's bully, a hypocrite on human rights which supports Saudi Arabia , a country with one of the worst human rights records in the world. If the US public was smart, they'd get rid of the joker in the White House and all his Republican friends, and increase their moral stature by apologizing for the debacle they wrought in the Middle East.

April 02, 2018

Last Wednesday morning, Laura Ingraham, Fox News’s queen of snark, tweeted that David Hogg – a 17-year-old who survived the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, and has been among the eloquent advocates for gun control – “whines about” being rejected by four universities he applied to. She linked to an article from the Daily Wire calling him a “gun rights provocateur.”

For Ingraham and Fox News, such cruel, ad-hominem attacks are typical. Vitriol helps boost ratings. After all, Fox is a central part of Donald Trump’s America. And Trump, like Fox News, has made bullying and humiliating people into an art form.

But television viewers are also consumers, and the ultimate goal of advertisers isn’t getting them to watch a particular television show. It’s getting them to buy the advertiser’s products. Which has caused a problem for Ingraham.

Shortly after Ingraham’s attack on Hogg, he called for Ingraham’s advertisers to boycott the show. Within days, a slew of them did just that.

As advertisers peeled off, Ingraham tried to take back her comment, saying the “spirit of Holy Week” motivated her to apologize for “any upset or hurt” she might have caused Hogg “or any of the brave victims of Parkland.”

Hogg rejected the apology. “She only apologized after we went after advertisers,” he told The New York Times. He then tweeted to Ingraham that he’d accept her apology “if you denounce the way your network has treated my friends and I in this fight. It’s time to love thy neighbor, not mudsling at children.”

Ingraham’s wasn’t the first venal, personal attack directed at the Parkland student survivors who have been advocating gun control, as amplified by Fox News.

Republican Leslie Gibson, who was running unopposed for a seat in the Maine State House, called Hogg a “moron” and “baldfaced liar,” and Emma González, another Parkland survivor, a “skinhead lesbian.” (This was too much for the good citizens of Maine. Gibson soon dropped out of the race.)

But unlike politicians who only have to survive elections every few years, corporations have to keep their consumers content all the time.

Selling satisfactory products and services is necessary but often not sufficient. Customers also want to feel good about the brands they’re buying. At the least, they don’t want to associate themselves with mean-spirited vitriol.

Liberty Mutual, the giant insurer, called Ingraham’s comments “inconsistent with our values as a company, especially when it comes to treating others with dignity and respect.” Nutrish, a pet food brand, said Ingraham’s comments “are not consistent with how we feel people should be treated.” TripAdvisor explained that Ingraham’s comments “cross the line of decency.”

Such explanations sound as if these companies chose to drop Ingraham’s show in order to be socially responsible. In truth, they’re just being smart at doing what they’re set up to do – make money. When it comes to consumer products, cruelty doesn’t sell.

Johnson & Johnson didn’t explain its decision to pull the plug on Ingraham, but it’s easy to see why it did. The company spends billions each year trying to convince consumers that Tylenol, baby powder, band aides, and its other brands will provide soothing comfort, analogous to a nurturing mother. Yet someone who ridicules a 17-year old shooting survivor for not getting into the college he chose is more like an abusive mother.

Behind all this is a new reality. The economy is now centered on intangibles like brand image and intellectual property, whose value can erode if connected with something nefarious. Look at what happened to Facebook.

Social media can speed up this process. Which is why advertisers reacted as quickly as they did to Hogg’s tweet.

It’s also why corporations have quickly ended commercial relationships with famous people accused of sexual harassment and abuse. These companies aren’t being socially responsible, either. They don’t want to sully their brands.

Companies are spending huge amounts seeking to connect their goods to consumers’ values. They know more about those values than anyone. Which suggests that Americans may have had enough cruelty – coming from Laura Ingraham, from Fox News, from Donald Trump, from the Harvey Weinsteins of the land, from whomever.

Meanwhile, the rest of us should help the process along, and continue to vote with our consumer dollars for decency.

March 29, 2018

America has had its share of crooks (Warren G. Harding, Richard Nixon), bigots (Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan), and incompetents (Andrew Johnson, George W. Bush). But never before Donald Trump have we had a president who combined all these nefarious qualities

America’s great good fortune was to begin with the opposite – a superb moral leader. By June of 1775, when Congress appointed George Washington to command the nation’s army, he had already “become a moral rallying post,” as his biographer, Douglas Southall Freeman, described him. He was,“the embodiment of the purpose, the patience, and the determination necessary for the triumph of the revolutionary cause.”

Washington won the war and then led the fledgling nation “by directness, by deference, and by manifest dedication to duty.”

A president’s most fundamental legal and moral responsibility is to uphold and protect our system of government. Donald Trump has degraded that system.

When he threatens to loosen federal libel laws so he can sue news organizations that are critical of him and revoke licenses of networks critical of him, he isn’t just bullying the media. He’s threatening the constitutionally guaranteed freedom and integrity of the press.

When he equated Neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members with counter-demonstrators in Charlottesville, Virginia, by blaming “both sides” for the violence, he wasn’t being neutral. He was condoning white supremacists, thereby undermining the constitution’s guarantee of equal rights.

When he pardoned Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, for a criminal contempt conviction, he wasn’t just signaling it’s okay for the police to engage in violations of civil rights. He was also subverting the rule of law by impairing the judiciary’s power to force public officials to abide by court decisions.

When he criticized NFL players for kneeling during the national anthem, he wasn’t just demanding they demonstrate their patriotism. He was disrespecting their – and, indirectly, everyone’s – freedom of speech.

When he berates the intelligence agencies and the federal bureau of investigation, he isn’t just questioning their competence. He’s suggesting they’re engaged in a giant conspiracy to remove him from office – potentially inviting his most ardent supporters to engage in a new civil war.

When he boasts that he made up information in a meeting with the prime minister of Canada, he isn’t just undermining his own credibility. He’s undermining the credibility of the United States in the eyes of the world.

Donald Trump is degrading the core institutions and values of our democracy.

But America is fighting back.

In Alabama, voters turned out in droves to elect a Democrat to the senate for the first time in 25 years. In Pennsylvania, Republicans lost control of a congressional district that went for Trump by nearly 20 percentage points. Since Trump took office, Democrats have flipped 39 Republican-held state legislative seats.

The 2018 midterm elections are approaching. It’s up to all of us to keep up the momentum. In the face of the worst president in history, we are at our best when striving to strengthen our democracy.

March 28, 2018

What’s worrying isn’t that Trump is now getting advice about policy from fanatics like John Bolton and Lawrence Kudlow. Trump has never cared about policy.

The real worry is that – with Robert Mueller breathing down his neck, and several special elections suggesting a giant “blue wave” in November – Trump is getting ready to do whatever it takes to maintain his power, even if that requires fanatical policies.

Trump is preparing for an epic war over the future of his presidency. This has required purging naysayers from his Cabinet and White House staff, and replacing them with bomb-throwing advocates like Bolton and Kudlow.

Fox News is preparing for the same war, and has made a parallel purge – removing Trump critics like George Will, Megyn Kelly, and Rich Lowry, and installing Trump marketers like Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin, and Sebastian Gorka.

Trump and Fox News are also approaching the war with the same story.

Some of it is by now familiar: Liberals have opened America to hostile forces – unauthorized immigrants, Muslims, Chinese traders, criminal gangs, drug dealers, government bureaucrats, coastal elites (Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi), North Korea, Iran, and “political correctness” in all its forms.

Trump intends to protect America from these forces.

The new twist to the story– requiring the recent purges and a united front – is that these forces are conspiring with the FBI to oust Trump from the presidency.

The membrane separating Trump’s brain from Fox News has always been thin, but in coming months it’s likely to disappear entirely.

We all know Trump watches an inordinate amount of Fox News, beginning in the wee hours with “Fox and Friends,” which provides much of the fodder for his morning tweets.

Trump has made John Bolton his National Security Advisor not because Bolton has valuable insights about foreign affairs, but because Bolton – for years, an on-air fixture on Fox News – is a showman who knows how to sell big lies and crazy ideas, and thereby help Trump in the looming battles.

As undersecretary of state for arms control in the Bush administration Bolton did more than anyone else to market the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. During his year and a half at the United Nations, Bolton was so outspokenly critical of the organization that he gained the devotion of xenophobic conservatives.

It hasn’t hurt that Bolton has sucked up to Trump since then. Describing Trump’s address last year to the United Nations, Bolton swooned “in the entire history of the United Nations, there has never been a more straightforward criticism of the unacceptable behavior of other member states.”

Kudlow isn’t a Fox News pundit but he’s been the next best thing – a rightwing CNBC contributor known for his sharp wit and salesmanship.

Several other cable news anchors and pundits are already in the Trump administration or will soon be, providing additional ammunition for Trump’s pending war.

“He’s looking for people who are ready to be part of that television White House,” says Kendall Phillips, a communication studies professor at Syracuse University. “This is the Fox television presidency all the way up and down.”

How can a television presidency be dangerous? Because it is solely about marketing Trump. Its only goal is to win. It is unconstrained by truth, reason, or the Constitution. It doesn’t give a fig about the public.

When the occupant of the White House and the sycophants surrounding him are prepared to do and use anything – including trade wars with China and possibly hot wars with North Korea and Iran – to win a political war at home, nothing and no one is safe.

March 26, 2018

Years before the president's lawyer made a $130,000 payment to Daniels ahead of the election, the actress was threatened with physical harm after speaking to a magazine about her relationship with Trump

Adult film star Stormy Daniels appeared on "60 Minutes" on Sunday night to give a long-awaited interview about her alleged affair with President Donald Trump. (Image: CBS/screenshot)

"This is about the extent that Mr. Cohen and the president have gone to intimidate this woman, to silence her, to threaten her, and to put her under their thumb. It is thuggish behavior from people in power. And it has no place in American democracy." —Michael Avenatti, attorney

In a long-awaited interview on CBS's "60 Minutes" on Sunday night, adult film star Stormy Daniels detailed a brief sexual relationship she says she had with President Donald Trump and potentially-illegal efforts and threats made by Trump and his associates to keep her quiet about the affair.

Five years after Daniels's single sexual encounter with Trump in 2006, she was offered $15,000 to tell her story to In Touch magazine. The story never ran because Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohen, threatened legal action against the publication—and weeks later, Daniels was threatened with physical harm by someone she had never met.

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Not long after the magazine story was killed, Stormy Daniels says she was threatened by a man who approached her in Las Vegas. “A guy walked up on me and said to me, ‘leave Trump alone. Forget the story.’” pic.twitter.com/JMskKQiYCi

"I was in a parking lot, going to a fitness class with my infant daughter," she told Anderson Cooper. "And a guy walked up on me and said to me, 'Leave Trump alone. Forget the story.' And then he leaned around and looked at my daughter and said, 'That's a beautiful little girl. It'd be a shame if something happened to her mom.' And then he was gone."

The encounter left Daniels shaken. She said it caused her to deny that the affair took place when a gossip website published a story about it later that year, and when various outlets offered her money to go public when Trump announced his run for president, she refused.

Daniels said she was later relieved to be offered $130,000 by Trump's lawyer in October 2016, just before the presidential election, in order to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) promising to keep quiet about the story.

"I turned down a large payday multiple times...I didn't wanna take away from the legitimate and legal, I'd like to point out, career that I've worked very hard to establish. I did not want my family and my child exposed to all the things that she's being exposed to right now," she said.

After the Wall Street Journal published a bombshell story alleging her affair with Trump this past January, Daniels said she was again pressured by Trump's team to deny that it had ever happened. Daniels also says she was warned "they" could make her "life hell in many different ways," if she didn't sign a statement refuting the Journal's story.

"I felt intimidated and honestly bullied," said Daniels. "And I didn't know what to do. And so I signed it."

"This is about the cover-up," said Daniels's attorney, Michael Avenatti, in the "60 Minutes" segment. "This is about the extent that Mr. Cohen and the president have gone to intimidate this woman, to silence her, to threaten her, and to put her under their thumb. It is thuggish behavior from people in power. And it has no place in American democracy."

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Attorney Michael Avenatti disputes the notion that Michael Cohen was working in a purely personal capacity when he arranged the hush money for Stormy Daniels. pic.twitter.com/91T0ofMnjt

Former FEC chairman Trevor Potter noted that Daniels's story is also about the $130,000 payment made to Daniels just before the election. Cohen has claimed the money came from his personal funds and that he paid it due to his concern for Trump, and not to influence the election. Avenatti calls the claim "laughable," while Potter and watchdog groups argue that the payment could still be a major ethics violation.

"It's a $130,000 in-kind contribution by Cohen to the Trump campaign, which is about $126,500 above what he's allowed to give," said Potter, now president of the Campaign Legal Center. "And if he does this on behalf of his client, the candidate, that is a coordinated, illegal, in-kind contribution by Cohen for the purpose of influencing the election, of benefiting the candidate by keeping this secret."

Earlier this month, the Washington Postreported that Special Counsel Robert Mueller was investigating "episodes involving Michael Cohen," leading to speculation that the payment he made to Daniels could have implications for Mueller's probe of the Trump campaign.

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March 21, 2018

It's not enough that the Mueller investigation is now looking at Trump's business ties. Now the Stormy Daniels of the world and the Summer Zervos are taking him to court for aggressive kissing and not signing his non-disclosure agreements. A judge (a woman actually) ruled that these suits against Trump could go forward in state court. I recall the Access Hollywood tape where Trump famously said. "I just go up and start kissing them or grab them by the pussy. You can do that if you're a star." Well, now Trump's star is starting to fade. But he's still friends with Vladimir Putin. He called to congratulate him on winning the Presidency again.

In Trump's mind Presidencies are a sometimes thing, they come and go, but business ties are forever. That's why he's maintaining the Putin friendship. He knows that whatever business deals are cooking between him and Putin will outlast his Presidency. Mueller may be closing in. Stormy Daniels may be closing in. Summer Zervos may be closing in. But Putin is Trump's BFF. He's not closing in. He's just waiting till Trump abandons his foolish gambit in the White House so they can get down to business and discuss the Moscow Trump Tower.

A judge ruled Tuesday that a former “Apprentice” contestant’s defamation lawsuit against President Trump may proceed, potentially allowing her lawyers to begin collecting evidence to support her claim that he forcibly kissed and groped her years ago.

The decision in the case brought by Summer Zervos came on the same day a former Playboy playmate, Karen McDougal, sued the publisher of the National Enquirer for the right to break her silence about the 10-month affair she says she had with Trump more than a decade ago.

The nearly simultaneous developments added to the political and legal challenges for the president, who has faced weeks of reports about his alleged affair with another woman, porn star Stormy Daniels, and his attorney’s effort to buy her silence.

All three women are now seeking to tell their stories on their own terms. McDougal is scheduled to give an interview Thursday to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, while “60 Minutes” is scheduled to air an interview with Daniels on Sunday.

As she rejected Trump’s effort to block Zervos’s lawsuit from proceeding, New York Supreme Court Justice Jennifer G. Schecter cited precedent from the Paula Jones case against President Bill Clinton, which led to his impeachment in 1998.

“No one is above the law,” Schecter wrote. “It is settled that the President of the United States has no immunity and is ‘subject to the laws’ for purely private acts.”

Yea, Jennifer. You go, girl. At least Zervos didn't contend that Trump grabbed her by the pussy. The guy is nuts if he thinks that, just because he's a star, he can have his way with whatever woman he chooses to lay his eyes on. Methinks Trump will get his come uppance soon. Then he can get on with real life - doing business deals with Vlad Putin and grabbin' them by the pussy.

U.S. President Donald Trump participates in a joint news conference with Amir Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah of Kuwait, September 7, 2017. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Trump is moving into a new and more dangerous phase.

Before, he was constrained by a few “adults” – Rex Tillerson, Gary Cohn, H.R. McMaster, and John Kelly – whom he appointed because he thought they had some expertise he lacked.

Now he’s either fired or is in the process of removing the adults. He’s replacing them with a Star Wars cantina of toadies and sycophants who will reflect back at him his own glorious view of himself, and help sell it on TV.

Narcissists are dangerous because they think only about themselves. Megalomaniacs are dangerous because they think only about their power and invincibility. A narcissistic megalomaniac who’s unconstrained – and who’s also president of the United States – is about as dangerous as they come.

The man who once said he could shoot someone dead on Fifth Avenue and still be elected president now openly boasts of lying to the Canadian Prime Minister, deciding on his own to negotiate mano a mano with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, unilaterally slapping tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, and demanding the death penalty for drug dealers.

For weeks, Trump has been pulling big policy pronouncements out of his derriere and then leaving it up to the White House to improvise explanations and implementation plans.

“Trump is increasingly flying solo,” report the Associated Press’ Catherine Lucey and Jonathan Lemire. “Trump has told confidants recently that he wants to be less reliant on his staff, believing they often give bad advice, and that he plans to follow his own instincts, which he credits with his stunning election.”

Trump has always had faith in his instincts. “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things,” he said on the campaign trail. "I’m a very instinctual person, but my instinct turns out to be right,“ he told Time Magazine last year.

But instincts aren’t facts, logic, or analysis. And it’s one thing for a business tycoon or even a presidential candidate to rely on instincts, quite another for the leader of the free world to rely solely on his gut.

Worse yet, the new Trump believes no one can lay a glove on him. He’s survived this far into his presidency despite lapses that would have done in most other presidents.

So what if he paid off a porn star to keep quiet about their affair? So what if he’s raking in money off his presidency? So what if there’s no evidence for his claims that three to five million fraudulent votes were cast for Hillary Clinton, or that Obama wiretapped him? There are no consequences.

The new Trump doesn’t worry that his approval ratings continue to be in the cellar. By his measure, he’s come out on top: His cable-TV ratings are huge. Fox News loves him. He dominates every news cycle. The pre-selected crowds at his rallies roar their approval.

He’s become the Mad King who says or does anything his gut tells him to, while everyone around him genuflects.

How will this end?

One outcome is Trump becomes irrelevant to the practical business of governing America. He gets all the attention he craves while decision makers in Washington and around the world mainly roll their eyes and ignore him.

There’s some evidence this is already happening. The Republican tax bill bore almost no resemblance to anything Trump had pushed for. Trump’s big infrastructure plan was dead on arrival in Congress. His surprise spending deal with “Chuck and Nancy” went nowhere. His momentary embrace of gun control measures in the wake of a Florida school shooting quickly evaporated.

Meanwhile, world leaders are now taking Trump’s braggadocio and ignorance for granted, acting as if America has no president.

But another possible outcome could be far worse.

Trump could become so enraged at anyone who seriously takes him on that he lashes out, with terrible consequences.

Furious that special counsel Robert Mueller has expanded his investigation, an unbridled Trump could fire him – precipitating a constitutional crisis and in effect a civil war between Trump supporters and the rest of America.

Feeling insulted and defied by Kim, an unconstrained Trump could order an attack on North Korea – precipitating a nuclear war.

The mind boggles. Who knows what a mad king will do when no adults remain to supervise him?

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March 12, 2018

Trump is unorthodox. Other Presidents would have not immediately accepted a meeting with the North Korean dictator. The conventional wisdom is that this would be elevating Kim Jong Un's status on the world stage. So what? The issue isn't about Un's status . The issue is about peace on the Korean peninsula.

Trump is unconventional. This lets him just do the right thing sometimes without a lot of lawyerly ifs, ases and wherefores preliminarily. If Trump can strike a deal for peace, let his advisors fret and fume. They want the status quo and the status quo is war. Unfortunately for them, Trump as President has a lot of power. They can't rein him in if he doesn't want to be reined in. Just maybe he will actually meet with Un and just maybe they will work out a peace deal. Just maybe Trump will do the right thing.

Just think. Dennis Rodman could be appointed ambassador to North Korea. He seems to be the only American that gets along with Un. Trump is right. The conventional approach has not worked for over half a century. If Trump wants to make peace, let him do it. Whether or not Un's status is elevated is irrelevant. The lawyerly approach is irrelevant.

It's unconscionable that North and South Korea sit there in a state of war because the US invaded. And to what end? What did the US accomplish there? It prevented Chinese communism from taking over the peninsula? You think? We invaded Vietnam for the same reason. That was a debacle. China is now our biggest trading partner. China's influence in the world is on the rise with its Belt and Road initiative. Now we are trading partners with them, by the way, a communist country. The US has fucked up so many times it's unbelievable. I won't even mention the invasion of Iraq. Yes, let's get more women in there as Congress persons. Maybe they will have an unconventional approach as well.

As a final note, the kids are telling the NRA to go fuck themselves. Good for them. We don't have to stand for a country where Wayne LaPierre is the dictator. Let's go the unconventional route for once and create a sane society.

March 10, 2018

Trump agreed to sit down with Kim Jong Un much to the dismay and chagrin of his advisors who say you just can't do that without a lot of preliminary fol de rol. Well, Trump isn't one to do things the conventional way or to go the conventional route. Of course he can always change his mind, but there is a chance that the meeting could go something like this.

Kim Jong Un: You know we never had a peace treaty from the Korean War. Technically, we're still at war. President Moon of South Korea wants to make peace with us

Trump: You know, it's ridiculous that the US has never allowed South Korea to make peace with you. Blame that on all my Democrat predecessors. Obama, Clinton, the whole lot of them. Also the military-industrial complex and the Generals, they never want to make peace. They're in the business of war. Their paycheck is conditional on war. When peace breaks out, they don't get paid.

Kim John Un: Then we're on the same page. We make peace with you. We make peace with President Moon, and finally the Korean War is over and we can get on with our business. We even build Trump hotel in North Korea.

Trump: Yeah, that would be a great first step to cement our friendship. By the way, could you loan my son-in-law, Jared Kushner a few million. He would like to build a few apartments in Korea as well.

KimJong Un: We could work that out. Yea! No more North Korea and South Korea. We are just one united Korea. Just like you. No red states and blue states. Just one United States.

Of course, Trump is unorthodox, but he always defers to those wiser and cooler heads around him that counsel him that you just can't do that. You just can't go and make peace with Kim Jong Un. He's our deadly enemy. You must make him unilaterally disarm first. He must give up his nuclear program. Making peace is not all that simple. There are a lot of whatifs, whereases and non sequiturs involved.

Trump, the deal maker, could pull off one of the biggest deals in history. It could happen, but I'm not holding my breath.

March 06, 2018

Before I turn to Jared Kushner, let me ask: Do you believe the U.S. government does the right thing all or most of the time?

The Gallup organization started asking this question in 1963, when over 70 percent of Americans said they did. Since then, the percent has steadily declined. By 2016, before Trump became president, only 16 percent of Americans agreed.

Why the decline? Surely various disappointments and scandals played a part – Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, “weapons of mass destruction,” the Wall Street bailout.

But the largest factor by far has been the rise of big money in politics. Most people no longer believe their voices count.

That view is backed by solid research. Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Professor Benjamin Page of Northwestern University analyzed 1,799 policy issues that came before Congress, and found “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

Instead, Gilens and Page concluded, lawmakers respond to the policy demands of wealthy individuals and moneyed business interests – those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns.

It’s likely far worse now. Gilens and Page’s data came from 1981 to 2002, before the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to big money in its Citizens United and McCutcheon decisions.

Trump and Bernie Sanders – authoritarian populist and progressive populist, respectively – based their shockingly successful campaigns on the public’s outrage at the corruption of our democracy by big money. Sanders called for a “political revolution.” Trump promised to “drain the swamp.”

Which brings us to Jared Kushner, the putative swamp-drainer’s son-in-law, and major advisor.

Kushner may yet be indicted in Robert Mueller’s investigation. But it could turn out that Kushner’s most significant contribution to the stench of this administration will come from his financial conflicts of interest.

When he took the White House job, Kushner chose not to follow the usual practice of wealthy people when they join administrations – putting their assets into blind trusts managed by outside experts.

Instead, Kushner retained control over the vast majority of his interest in Kushner Companies, worth as much as $761 million, according to government ethics filings.

So how has Kushner separated his business dealings from his dealings on behalf of the United States? He hasn’t.

The Timesreported last week that after the CEOs of Citigroup and Apollo Global Management attended White House meetings set up by Kushner, the two firms loaned the Kushner family business more than $500 million.

Furthermore, once the loan was received, the Securities and Exchange Commission dropped an inquiry of Apollo Global Management.

Last spring, Kushner’s real-estate firm sought hundreds of millions of dollars directly from the Qatar government, for its distressed property on Fifth Avenue, reports the Intercept. Soon after Qatar turned down the request, Kushner supported a diplomatic assault on Qatar that sparked a crisis continuing today.

Kushner is such an easy mark that officials in at least four countries have privately discussed ways to manipulate him with financial deals, according to U.S. intelligence.

Kushner insists that he’s done nothing wrong, and there’s no direct evidence he has profited off his position in White House or put personal financial interests ahead of the interests of the American public.

But that’s not the point. Conflicts of interest are always difficult to prove, which is why we have ethics rules to avoid even the appearance of such conflicts.

And it sure looks as if Kushner is using his White House perch to make money for himself, just as is his father-in-law.

It’s as bad for a government official to look as if he’s lining his pockets as for him to actually do so, because the appearance of corruption undermines public trust just as readily as the real thing. And trust is what distinguishes an advanced democracy from a banana republic.

But Trump and the members of his family he’s brought into his White House don’t give a hoot about public trust. They have utter contempt for the common good. Government ethics officials have compared Trump’s administration to a game of whack-a-mole – go after one potential violation, and others pop up.

Perhaps Kushner tells himself that the American public is already so cynical about big money’s takeover of our democracy that his own apparent, or real, conflicts are chicken feed by comparison.

Which may be true. But by adding to the distrust, Kushner is doing his own bit to destroy American democracy – actions almost as treasonous as if he colluded with Russians to make his father-in-law president.

March 05, 2018

Donald Trump once said he identified with Ayn Rand’s character Howard Roark in “The Fountainhead,” an architect so upset that a housing project he designed didn’t meet specifications he had it dynamited.

Others in Trump’s circle were influenced by Rand. “Atlas Shrugged” was said to be the favorite book of Rex Tillerson, Trump’s secretary of state. Rand also had a major influence on Mike Pompeo, Trump’s CIA chief. Trump’s first nominee for Secretary of Labor, Andrew Puzder, said he spent much of his free time reading Rand.

The Republican leader of the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, required his staff to read Rand.

Uber’s founder and former CEO, Travis Kalanick, has described himself as a Rand follower. Before he was sacked, he applied many of her ideas to Uber’s code of values, and even used the cover art for Rand’s book “The Fountainhead” as his Twitter avatar.

Who is Ayn Rand and why does she matter? Ayn Rand – best known for two highly-popular novels still widely read today – “The Fountainhead,” published in 1943, and “Atlas Shrugged,” in 1957 – didn’t believe there was a common good. She wrote that selfishness is a virtue, and altruism is an evil that destroys nations.

When Rand offered these ideas they seemed quaint if not far-fetched. Anyone who lived through the prior half century witnessed our interdependence, through depression and war.

After the war we used our seemingly boundless prosperity to finance all sorts of public goods – schools and universities, a national highway system, and healthcare for the aged and poor (Medicare and Medicaid). We rebuilt war-torn Europe. We sought to guarantee the civil rights and voting rights of African-Americans. We opened doors of opportunity to women. Of course there was a common good. We were living it.

But then, starting in the late 1970s, Rand’s views gained ground. She became the intellectual godmother of modern-day American conservatism.

This utter selfishness, this contempt for the public, this win-at-any-cost mentality is eroding American life.

Without adherence to a set of common notions about right and wrong, we’re living in a jungle where only the strongest, cleverest, and most unscrupulous get ahead, and where everyone must be wary in order to survive. This is not a society. It’s not even a civilization, because there’s no civility at its core. It’s a disaster.

In other words, we have to understand who Ayn Rand is so we can reject her philosophy and dedicate ourselves to rebuilding the common good.

The idea of the common good was once widely understood and accepted in America. After all, the U.S. Constitution was designed for “We the people” seeking to “promote the general welfare” – not for “me the selfish jerk seeking as much wealth and power as possible.”

Yet today you find growing evidence of its loss – CEOs who gouge their customers, loot their corporations and defraud investors. Lawyers and accountants who look the other way when corporate clients play fast and loose, who even collude with them to skirt the law.

Wall Street bankers who defraud customers and investors. Film producers and publicists who choose not to see that a powerful movie mogul they depend on is sexually harassing and abusing young women.

Politicians who take donations (really, bribes) from wealthy donors and corporations to enact laws their patrons want, or shutter the government when they don’t get the partisan results they seek.

And a president of the United States who lies repeatedly about important issues, refuses to put his financial holdings into a blind trust and then personally profits off his office, and foments racial and ethnic conflict.

The common good consists of our shared values about what we owe one another as citizens who are bound together in the same society. A concern for the common good – keeping the common good in mind – is a moral attitude. It recognizes that we’re all in it together.

February 26, 2018

Students staged a “lie-in” outside the White House on Monday to promote gun control reform.Credit Zach Gibson/Getty Images

On Wednesday, after listening to the heart-rending stories of those who lost children and friends in the Parkland school shooting — while holding a cue card with empathetic-sounding phrases — Donald Trump proposed his answer: arming schoolteachers.

It says something about the state of our national discourse that this wasn’t even among the vilest, stupidest reactions to the atrocity. No, those honors go to the assertions by many conservative figures that bereaved students were being manipulated by sinister forces, or even that they were paid actors.

Still, Trump’s horrible idea, taken straight from the N.R.A. playbook, was deeply revealing — and the revelation goes beyond issues of gun control. What’s going on in America right now isn’t just a culture war. It is, on the part of much of today’s right, a war on the very concept of community, of a society that uses the institution we call government to offer certain basic protections to all its members.

Before I get there, let me remind you of the obvious: We know very well how to limit gun violence, and arming civilians isn’t part of the answer.

No other advanced nation experiences frequent massacres the way we do. Why? Because they impose background checks for prospective gun owners, limit the prevalence of guns in general and ban assault weapons that allow a killer to shoot dozens of people before he (it’s always a he) can be taken down. And yes, these regulations work.

February 20, 2018

First, you can complain. Yell. Bang on the dinner table. Tell your family and friends the man is a dangerous fool. Explode every time you read something about him. Swear every time you see him on TV. Go ballistic when you listen to him or about him on the radio.

Complaining may feel good, but it won’t help.

Your second choice: You can bury your head in the sand. Pretend he’s not there. Stop reading the news. Turn off the TV and radio. No longer visit political Internet sites. When family or friends bring up his name, change the subject.

Burying your head in the sand may also feel good, but it certainly won’t help, either.

You have a third choice. You can get active, and make it harder for Trump to damage America. This coming November 6, 34 senate seats, all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, and 36 governorships will be up for election or re-election.

Support primary candidates who will resist Trump. Mobilize to get out the vote. Organize so that November 6 becomes a total repudiation of Donald Trump and all he stands for.

Start right now. Find an Indivisible group near you. Go Indivisible.org and become part of the solution. If you’re already in a blue state and want to reach out to purple or red parts of the country, visit swingleft.org or sisterdistrict.com.

February 10, 2018

Trump brought up the matter of "shithole countries," countries from which he didn't want to accept immigrants presumably because they were so poor, backward and uneducated. Then there's the matter of hellhole countries, those countries destroyed by American bombs and weaponry, destruction that was set off by George W Bush's invasion of Iraq based on a lie. Sure, now other entities are fighting in the Middle East like al-Nusra, al-Qaeda, ISIS. They are all using American made weapons. Our defense contractors don't care who uses their weapons as long as they get get more product out the door. The more fighting that goes on, the more the military-industrial complex prospers.

Right now in Mosul thousands of children can't get medical treatment because of the infrastructure that has been destroyed. That area is surely a hellhole, if not a shithole. By definition a hellhole country is a country destroyed by the US military or its weaponry. "400,000 children still displaced from Mosul fighting," read the headline in a Reuters report dated October 15, 2017. The report continued:

“Just because the fighting in Mosul has stopped doesn’t mean the humanitarian needs aren’t great. If anything, children need our help now more than ever - those that are still displaced and those that are returning to see what’s left of their homes,” said the London-based charity’s Iraq country director, Ana Locsin.

“Large parts of Mosul have been reduced to rubble; schools, homes, hospitals, roads, playgrounds and parks. I’ve spoken to dozens of children haunted by their experiences, left with psychological scars that’ll take years to heal,” Locsin said in a statement.

What responsibility does the US have to the vast number of children whose homes, playgrounds and schools have been destroyed? Is it to let them immigrate to the US? I don't think so. However, the US does have a responsibility to rebuild the homes and infrastructure that have been destroyed on account of US meddling and destruction of their neighborhoods. So what is the response? $165 billion more to the military a few days ago. Nothing for the Peace Corps or any agency that has any responsibility to rebuild the areas destroyed by the US military. US military efforts have for the most part only succeeded in destroying the lives of civilians including women and old people. Hospitals have been destroyed. Schools have been destroyed. Any humanitarian efforts have been destroyed.

And what is the US response to that? $165 billion more for the military with nary a whisper of dissent. Not one critical comment from the US media. Not one penny for the Peace Corps or any US agency that might rebuild Iraq. Does one even exist? That's why American citizens need the international media here in order to get some perspective on this all out attack on civilization being carried out in their name. Instead, the drumbeat of war keeps rumbling ahead.

February 09, 2018

Trump’s promise that corporations will use his giant new tax cut to make new investments and raise workers’ wages is proving to be about as truthful as his promise to release his tax returns.

The results are coming in, and guess what? Almost all the extra money is going into stock buybacks. Since the tax cut became law, buy-backs have surged to $88.6 billion. That’s more than double the amount of buybacks in the same period last year, according to data provided by Birinyi Associates.

Compare this to the paltry $2.5 billion of employee bonuses corporations say they’ll dispense in response to the tax law, and you see the bonuses for what they are – a small fig leaf to disguise the big buybacks.

If anything, the current tumult in the stock market will fuel even more buybacks.

Stock buybacks are corporate purchases of their own shares of stock. Corporations do this to artificially prop up their share prices.

Buybacks are the corporate equivalent of steroids. They may make shareholders feel better than otherwise, but nothing really changes.

Money spent on buybacks isn’t reinvested in new equipment, research, or factories. Buybacks don’t add jobs or raise wages. They don’t increase productivity. They don’t grow the American economy.

Yet CEOs love buybacks because most CEO pay is now in shares of stock and stock options rather than cash. So when share prices go up, executives reap a bonanza.

At the same time, the value of CEO pay from previous years also rises, in what amounts to a retroactive (and off the books) pay increase – on top of their already humongous compensation packages.

Buybacks used to be illegal. The Securities and Exchange considered them unlawful means of manipulating stock prices, in violation of the Securities Acts of 1933 and 1934.

In those days, the typical corporation put about half its profits into research and development, plant and equipment, worker retraining, additional jobs, and higher wages.

But under Ronald Reagan, who rhapsodized about the “magic of the market,” the SEC legalized buybacks.

After that, buybacks took off. Just in the past decade, 94 percent of corporate profits have been devoted to buybacks and dividends, according to researchers at the Academic-Industry Research Network.

Last year, big American corporations spent a record $780 billion buying back their shares of stock.

And that was before the new tax law.

Put another way, the new tax law is giving America’s wealthy not one but two big windfalls: They stand to gain the most from the tax cuts for individuals, and they’re the big winners from the tax cuts for corporations.

This isn’t just unfair. It’s also bad for the economy as a whole. Corporations don’t invest because they get tax cuts. They invest because they expect that customers will buy more of their goods and services.

This brings us to the underlying problem. Companies haven’t been investing – and have been using their profits to buy back their stock instead – because they doubt their investments will pay off in additional sales.

That’s because most economic gains have been going to the wealthy, and the wealthy spend a far smaller percent of their income than the middle class and the poor. When most gains go to the top, there’s not enough demand to justify a lot of new investment.

Which also means that as long as public policies are tilted to the benefit of those at the top – as is Trump’s tax cut, along with Reagan’s legalization of stock buybacks – we’re not going to see much economic growth.

February 08, 2018

Trump to global CEOs and financiers in Davos, Switzerland: “America is open for business.” We’re now a great place for you to make money. We’ve slashed taxes and regulations so you can make a bundle here.

Trump to ambitious young immigrants around the world, including those brought here as children: America is closed. We don’t want you. Forget that poem affixed to the Statue of Liberty about bringing us your poor yearning to breathe free. Don’t even try.

In Trump’s America, global capital is welcome, people aren’t.

Well, I have news for the so-called businessman. America was built by ambitious people from all over the world, not by global capital.

Global capital wants just one thing: A high return on its investment.

Global capital has no obligation to any country or community. If there’s another place around the world where taxes are lower and regulations laxer, global capital will move there at the speed of an electronic blip.

Global capital doesn’t care how it gets a high return. If it can get it by slashing wages, outsourcing to contract workers, polluting air and water, defrauding investors, or destroying communities, it will.

People are different. Once they’ve rooted somewhere, they generally stay put. They develop webs of connections and loyalties.

If they’re ambitious – and, let’s face it, the one characteristic that almost all immigrants to America have shared for more than two centuries is ambition – they develop skills, educate their kids, and contribute to their communities and their nation.

My great grandfather arrived in America from Ukraine. He was nineteen years old and penniless. What brought him here was his ambition. He built a business. He started a family.

Then he invited his brothers and sisters from Ukraine to join him. He put them up in his home and gave them some of his savings to start their own lives as Americans.

You may call it “chain migration,” Mr. Trump, but we used to call it “family reunification.” We believed it wasn’t just humane to allow members from abroad to join their loved ones here, but also good for the America. It made the nation stronger and more prosperous.

By the way, Mr. Trump, global capital doesn’t create jobs. Jobs are created when customers want more goods and services. Nobody invests in a business unless they expect consumers to buy what that business will produce. Those consumers include immigrants.

Consumers are also workers. The more productive they are and the better they’re paid, the more goods and services they buy – creating a virtuous circle of higher wages and more jobs.

They become more productive and better paid when they have access to good schools and universities, good health care, and well-maintained transportation systems linking them together.

This combination – people rooted in families and communities, supplemented by ambitious young immigrants, all aided by good education and infrastructure – made America the economic powerhouse it is today.

Along the way, regulations proved to be necessary guardrails. We protected the environment, prevented fraud, and tried to stop financial entities from gambling away everyone’s savings, because we came to see that capitalism without such guardrails is a mudslide.

We didn’t accomplish what we’ve achieved by cutting taxes and slashing regulations so global investors could make more money in America, while preventing ambitious immigrants from coming to our shores.

We raised taxes – especially on big corporations and wealthy individuals – in order to finance good schools, public universities, and infrastructure. We regulated business. And we welcomed immigrants and reunited families.

Global capital came our way not because we were a cheap place to do business but because we were fabulously productive and innovative place to do business.

Now Trump and his rich backers want to undo all this. No one should be surprised. When they look at the economy they only see money. They’ve made lots of it.

But the real economy is people. America should be open to ambitious people even if they’re dirt poor, like my great grandfather. It should also be open to their relations, whose family members here will give them a start.

It should invest in people, as it once did.

America didn’t become great by global capital seeking higher returns but by people from all over world seeking better lives. And global capital won’t make it great again.

February 07, 2018

Public Citizen's brief connects the dots, documenting with concise, easy-to-grasp specifics how Trump the faux populist has systematically sold out the working families whose votes he cynically swiped, handing our government to a kakistocracy of corporate plutocrats.

"Sure enough, Trump and his crew of voracious corporate plutocrats are gorging themselves on new rules that further enrich America's already-rich elites at our expense." (Photo: Screenshot/Public Citizen)

Why does Donald Trump constantly preface his outlandish lies with such phrases as: "To be honest with you," "To tell the truth" and "Believe me"?

Because even he knows that as a lifelong con-man, his voice takes on the tone of a snake-oil salesman when he starts exaggerating and prevaricating, so he reflexively tries to puff up his credibility with an extra dose of bluster: "No really, trust me, I never lie..." In fact, just in the past year, Trump's documented whoppers rank him as the lyingest president in U.S. history. And that included Nixon!

It's not the volume of his fabrications that is so gross, but their enormity. Most damnable of all has been his masquerading as a golden-haired billionaire "populist" who's standing up for America's hard-hit middle class against Wall Street, corporate lobbyists and moneyed elites — a carefully crafted PR pose that has duped many working stiffs into thinking he is their champion.

Even before he was sworn in last year, President Trump stripped off the populist garments he wore during his campaign and publicly bared his naked plutocratic essence by naming bankster Gary Cohn to be his top economic advisor.

Cohn is one of five top economic officials our fake populist president brought into his government from just one of Wall Street's most abusive banks, Goldman Sachs. How many officials did he add to bring such legitimate voices as consumers, workers, and poor people to his policy making table? Zero.

So, since if we don't have a seat at the table, we're on the menu! Sure enough, Trump and his crew of voracious corporate plutocrats are gorging themselves on new rules that further enrich America's already-rich elites at our expense. For example, they're reducing penalties for Wall Street fraud and gouging; eliminating the requirement that firms advising us on where to invest our savings have to act in our best interests, rather than their own; loosening the few protections we have against predatory lenders; raising the number of temporary, low-wage foreign workers that corporations can bring in to take our jobs; scrapping a rule requiring corporate giants to report their unequal pay to women; opening up Social Security to cuts and privatization; limiting fines on nursing home negligence that harm or even kill residents; eliminating funds for low-income heating and programs to protect kids from lead paint; repealing fracking rules that protect water and air quality; allowing for-profit, private colleges to gouge students; ending funding that provides legal services for poor people; and raising entrance fees at our national parks

These are just a few of Trump & Company's ongoing rush-rush and hush-hush assaults on our rights, protections and basic needs — all orchestrated to free a tiny minority of moneyed powers to run roughshod over the great majority of Americans.

That's why a new, straight-talking pamphlet by the watchdog group, public Citizen, is so important. It starts with Trump's declaration if his inaugural address last year that, "The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer." Then it shows that he immediately abandoned any pretense of populist principles, proceeding from day one to further enrich and empower the same multinational corporations and mega-rich elites he had denounced as a candidate. While there have been multiple news reports throughout the past year about this action or that by Trump Incorporated, Public Citizen's brief connects the dots, documenting with concise, easy-to-grasp specifics how Trump the faux populist has systematically sold out the working families whose votes he cynically swiped, handing our government to a kakistocracy of corporate plutocrats. It's not merely that he's an irredeemable liar, but that Trump himself is a lie.

The Public Citizen expose, titled "Forgetting the Forgotten: 101 Ways Donald Trump Has Betrayed His Populist Agenda," drives the stake of truth through the heart of his populist lie. It should not just be read, but used like a Thomas Paine pamphlet to spread the truth. To download a free copy, go to CorporatePresidency.org/forgotten.

Trump supporters seem to rationalize that, because Trump is a billionaire, he's not in it for the money like a lot of politicians who succumb to lobbyists' pleas in return for campaign contributions, jobs when they leave office etc. But when has a billionaire ever been content that they have enough money and can devote themselves to public service? Certainly not Trump. I think he sees the Presidency as a fantastic financial opportunity, but not on the petty scale that Congressmen aspire to. No, he's got his sights set on doing deals for himself and his family all over the world - Russia and Israel in particular.

Why else is he sending Jared Kushner all over meeting with Russians and Israelis. Israel has already given Kushner millions for his flagging businesses. Kushner's company received a $30 million investment from one of Israel’s largest financial institutions, Menora Mivtachim. Tit for Tat, Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalen recognizing that city as Israel's capital much to the chagrin of every other nation on earth especially the Palestinians. According to the New York Times, "The business dealings don’t appear to violate federal ethics laws, which require Mr. Kushner to recuse himself only from narrow government decisions that would have a “direct and predictable effect” on his financial interests." Of course not. Federal ethics laws never anticipated a President and his family doing deals all over the world.

The biggest deal he's done so far for the Trump empire is cutting taxes for the wealthy. Trump wouldn't do a deal that was good for America if it were not good for him personally. He means to come out of this stint as the President wealthier than ever. Gone are the days when Presidents put their assets in a blind trust. That's not for Trump. Ha. Ha. He has his whole family out there doing deals that may or may not benefit the pitiful Trump voter, but they sure will benefit him and his family. After all he's a follower of Herbert Spencer and Ayn Rand. It's survival of the fittest, baby, and devil take the hindermost.

When all is said and done with the Mueller investigation, I think what they'll find out is that Trump was not colluding with Russia in some nefarious way to undermine the US government. He was simply colluding with Russia to do a business deal that would make the Trump empire richer than ever.

February 06, 2018

If Robert Mueller finds that Trump colluded with Russia to fix the 2016 election, or even if Trump fires Mueller before he makes such a finding, Trump’s supporters will protect Trump from any political fallout.

Trump’s base will stand by him not because they believe Trump is on their side, but because they define themselves as being on his side.

Trump has intentionally cleaved America into two warring camps: pro-Trump and anti-Trump. And he has convinced the pro-Trumps that his enemy is their enemy.

Most Americans are not passionate conservatives or liberals, Republicans or Democrats. But they have become impassioned Trump supporters or Trump haters.

Polls say 37 percent of Americans approve of him, and most disapprove. These numbers are the tips of two vast icebergs of intensity.

Trump has forced all of us to take sides, and to despise those on the other. There’s no middle ground.

The Republican Party used to stand for fiscal responsibility, state’s rights, free trade, and a hard line against Russian aggression. Now it just stands for Trump.

Pro-Trump Republicans remain the majority in the GOP. As long as Trump can keep them riled up, and as long as Republicans remain in control of at least one chamber of Congress, he’s safe.

“Try to impeach him, just try it,” Roger Stone, Trump’s former campaign adviser, warned last summer. “You will have a spasm of violence in this country, an insurrection like you’ve never seen.”

That’s probably an exaggeration, but Trump (with the assistance of his enablers in Congress) has convinced his followers that the Russian investigation is part of a giant conspiracy to unseat him, and that his enemies want to replace him with someone who will allow dangerous forces to overrun America.

Sure, this paranoia is based on the same racism and xenophobia that has smoldered in America since its inception. Trump’s strategy is to stoke it daily.

Sure, American politics had polarized before Trump. Trump’s strategy is to exploit and enlarge these divisions.

A few months ago I traveled to Kentucky and talked with a number of Trump supporters.

They looked and sounded nothing like traditional conservative Republicans. Most were working class. Several were members of labor unions. All were passionate about Trump.

Why do you support him? I asked. “He’s shaking Washington up,” was the typical response.

I mentioned his lies. “He’s telling it like it is,” several told me. “He speaks his mind.”

I talked about his attacks on democracy. “Every other politician is on the take,” they said. “He isn’t. He doesn’t need their money.”

I asked about his campaign’s possible collusion with Russia. They told me they didn’t believe a word of it. “It’s a plot to get rid of him.”

By making himself the center of an intensifying conflict, Trump grabs all the attention and fuels even greater passions on both sides.

It’s what he did in the 2016 election, but on a far larger scale. Then, he sucked all the oxygen out of the race by making himself its biggest story. Now, he’s sucking all the oxygen out of America by making himself our national obsession.

Trump received more coverage in the 2016 election than any presidential candidate in American history. Hillary Clinton got far less, and what she got was almost all about her emails.

Schooled in reality television and New York tabloids, Trump knows how to keep both sides stirred up: Vilify, disparage, denounce, defame, and accuse the other side of conspiring against America. Do it continuously. Dominate every news cycle.

Fox News is his propaganda arm, magnifying his tweets, rallies, and lies. The rest of the media also plays into Trump’s strategy by making him the defining controversy of America. Every particular dispute – DACA, the “wall,” North Korea, Mueller’s investigation, and so on – becomes another aspect of the larger national war over Trump.

It’s the divide-and-conquer strategy of a tyrant.

Democracies require sufficient social trust that citizens regard the views of those they disagree with as worthy of equal consideration to their own. That way, they’ll accept political outcomes they dislike.

Trump’s divide-and-conquer strategy is to destroy that trust.

So if Mueller finds Trump colluded with Russia, or Trump fires Mueller before Mueller makes such a finding, the pro-Trumps will block any consequential challenge to his authority.

February 05, 2018

"Conservatives even tend to believe that inequality is part of the natural order, and that any attempt to change it is senseless." (Photo: Gage Skidmore/flickr/cc)

It's incomprehensible to many of us that people could support a president who, in Bernie Sanders' words, "is compulsively dishonest, who is a bully, who actively represents the interests of the billionaire class, who is anti-science, and who is trying to divide us up based on the color of our skin, our nation of origin, our religion, our gender, or our sexual orientation."

Based on various trusted sources and a dab of cognitive science, it's fair to conclude that there are three main reasons for this unlikely phenomenon.

1. Trump's Followers Believe They're Better Than Other People

Nationalism, exceptionalism, narcissism, racism. They're all part of the big picture, although it's unfair to simply dismiss Trump people as ignorant racists. Many of them are well-educated and wealthy. But well-to-do individuals tend to feel entitled, superior, uninterested in the people 'beneath' them, and less willing to support the needs of society. Thus many wealthy white Americans are just fine with Trump's disdain for the general population.

Poorer whites also feel superior, in the sense that they're reluctant to give up their long-time self-assigned position at the top of the racial hierarchy.

Trump and the Republicans don't seem to care at all about poor people, especially people of color. It's nearly beyond belief that they'd allow a father to be torn away from his family after living in the U.S. for 30 years; that they'd allow tens of thousands of Americans to sleep outside in subzero weather; or that they'd ignore the women and children being blown up by our bombs in Yemen.

2. They're Driven by Hatred for Their Perceived Enemies

According to an ancient proverb, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." For many besieged Americans, the friend is Donald Trump, the enemy of his followers' enemies, based on his belligerent put-downs of so many target groups that have been recklessly blamed for America's problems. He's been against a 'lying' media, 'job-stealing' immigrants, 'business-stifling' environmentalists, 'elites' like Hillary Clinton who are thought to look down on struggling middle-class whites, and the LGBTQ community and pro-abortion groups, who threaten the religious right's 'traditional' values to a point they consider much worse than Trump's moral depravity.

Their greatest enemy may be the traditional politician, who has allowed the middle class to falter. Trump is unconventional, different from anyone before him. As long as their president is disrupting the status quo, change is happening, and any change, his supporters believe, is likely to defeat one or more of their enemies.

3. They Refuse to Admit They Were Wrong

In fact, the more they're proven wrong the stronger their resolve. This is called cognitive dissonance. It's common for conservatives to construct their personal beliefs on a moral basis, to adhere to them in the face of any controversy, and if necessary to reshape the evidence to fit these beliefs. Many conservatives continue to fall for Trump's hyperbole about a 'booming' economy and new jobs and better times to come.

Conservatives even tend to believe that inequality is part of the natural order, and that any attempt to change it is senseless. Cognitive dissonance kicks in for them when they are confronted with the overwhelming evidence for a collapsing middle class. Rather than re-evaluating their beliefs, they go to the other extreme and defend the widening fracture in U.S. society as a natural consequence of an imagined meritocracy. Incredibly, according to one poll, in 2014 only 5 percent of the U.S. population believed that the government should be addressing inequality.

So Now What?

In his rebuttal to Donald Trump's State of the Union address, Rep. Joe Kennedy (D-MA) said, "This administration isn't just targeting the laws that protect us — they are targeting the very idea that we are all worthy of protection."

..that we are all worthy of protection. That will only happen with a progressive candidate who believes that a strong society makes successful individuals, not the other way around.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

February 03, 2018

1. He told you he’d cut your taxes, and that the super-rich like him would pay more. You bought it. But his new tax law does the opposite. By 2027, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, the richest 1 percent will have got 83 percent of the tax cut and the richest 0.1 percent, 60 percent of it. But more than half of all Americans — 53 percent — will pay more in taxes. As Trump told his wealthy friends at Mar-a-Lago just days after the tax bill became law, “You all just got a lot richer.”

2. He promised to close “special interest loopholes that have been so good for Wall Street investors but unfair to American workers,” especially the notorious “carried interest” loophole for private-equity, hedge fund, and real estate partners. You bought it. But the new tax law keeps the “carried interest” loophole.

3. He told you he’d repeal Obamacare and replace it with something “beautiful.” You bought it. But he didn’t repeal and he didn’t replace. (Just as well: His plan would have knocked at least 23 million Americans off health insurance, including many of you.) Instead, he’s doing what he can to cut it back and replace it with nothing. The new tax law will result in 13 million people losing health coverage, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

4. He told you he’d invest $1 trillion in our nation’s crumbling infrastructure. You bought it. But after his giant tax cut for corporations and millionaires, there’s no money left for infrastructure.

5. He said he’d drain the Washington swamp. You bought it. But he’s brought into his administration more billionaires, CEOs, and Wall Street moguls than in any administration in history, to make laws that will enrich their businesses, and he’s filled departments and agencies with former lobbyists, lawyers and consultants who are crafting new policies for the same industries they recently worked for.

6. He said he’d use his business experience to whip the White House into shape. You bought it. But he has created the most dysfunctional, back-stabbing White House in modern history, and has already fired and replaced so many assistants (one of them hired and fired in a little more than a week) that people there barely know who’s in charge of what.

7. He told you he’d “bring down drug prices” by making deals with drug companies. You bought it. But now the White House says that promise is “inoperative.”

8. He told you he’d “stop foreign lobbyists from raising money for American elections.” You bought it. But foreign lobbyists are still raising money for American elections.

9. He told you “I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid.” You bought it. But he and House Speaker Paul Ryan are already planning such cuts in order to deal with the ballooning deficit created, in part, by the new tax law for corporations and the rich.

10. He promised “six weeks of paid maternity leave to any mother with a newborn child whose employer does not provide the benefit.” You bought it. But the giant tax cut for corporations and the rich doesn’t leave any money for this.

11. He said that on Day One he’d label China a “currency manipulator.” You bought it. But then he met with China’s president Xi Jinping and declared “China is not a currency manipulator.” Ever since then, Trump has been cozying up to Xi.

12. He said he “won’t bomb Syria.” You bought it. Then he bombed Syria.

13. He said he’d build a “wall” across the southern border. You believed him. But chief of staff John Kelly says it is “unlikely that we will build a wall, a physical barrier, from sea to shining sea.”

14. He promised that the many women who accused him of sexual misconduct “will be sued after the election is over.” You bought it. He hasn’t sued them, presumably because he doesn’t want the truth to come out.

15. He said he would not be a president who took vacations, and he called Barack Obama “the vacationer-in-Chief.” You bought it. But since becoming President he has spent nearly 25 percent of his days at one of his golf properties for some portion of the day, according to Golf News Network, at a cost to taxpayers of over $77 million. That’s already more taxpayer money on vacations than Obama cost in the first 3 years of his presidency. Not to mention all the money taxpayers are spending protecting his family, including his two sons who travel all over the world on Trump business.

16. He said he’d force companies to keep jobs in America, and that there would be “consequences” for companies that shipped jobs abroad. You believed him. But despite their promises, Carrier, Ford, GM, and the rest have continued to ship jobs to Mexico and China. Carrier (a division of United Technologies) has moved ahead with plans to send 1,000 jobs at its Indiana plant to Mexico. Notwithstanding, the federal government has rewarded United Technologies with 15 new contracts since Trump’s inauguration. GE is sending jobs to Canada. IBM is sending them to Costa Rica, Egypt, Argentina, and Brazil. There have been no “consequences” for sending all these jobs overseas.

17. He promised to revive the struggling coal industry and “bring back thousands” of lost mining jobs. You bought it. But coal jobs continue to disappear. Since Trump’s victory, at least 6 plants that relied on coal have closed or announced they will close. Another 40 are projected to close during the president’s four-year term. Utilities continue to switch to natural gas instead of coal, and renewable energy is cheaper than ever.

18. He promised to protect steel workers. But according to the American Iron and Steel Institute, which tracks shipments, steel imports were 19.4 percent higher in the first 10 months of 2017 than in the same period last year. That import surge has hurt American steel workers, who were already struggling against a glut of cheap Chinese steel.

19. He said he’d make America safer. You believed him. But according to Mass Shooting Tracker, there have been 377 mass shootings so far in the Trump administration, including 58 people killed and hundreds injured at a concert in Las Vegas, and 26 churchgoers killed and 20 injured at a church in Texas. Trump refuses to consider any gun control legislation.

20. He said he’d release his taxes. “I’m under a routine audit and it’ll be released, and as soon as the audit is finished it will be released,“ he promised during the campaign. He hasn’t released his taxes.

January 31, 2018

Following President Donald Trump's State of the Union address on Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) offered a response.

"I want to take a few minutes of your time to respond to Trump's State of the Union speech," Sanders announced. "But I also want to talk to you about the major crises facing our country that, regrettably, Trump chose not to discuss."

And, he added, "I want to offer a vision of where we should go as a nation which is far different than the divisiveness, dishonesty, and racism coming from the Trump Administration over the past year."

Watch:

The complete text of Sanders' prepared remarks follow:

Good evening. Thanks for joining us.

Tonight, I want to take a few minutes of your time to respond to President Trump’s State of the Union speech. But I want to do more than just that. I want to talk to you about the major crises facing our country that, regrettably, President Trump chose not to discuss. I want to talk to you about the lies that he told during his campaign and the promises he made to working people which he did not keep.

Finally, I want to offer a vision of where we should go as a nation which is far different than the divisiveness, dishonesty, and racism coming from the Trump Administration over the past year.

President Trump talked tonight about the strength of our economy. Well, he’s right. Official unemployment today is 4.1 percent which is the lowest it has been in years and the stock market in recent months has soared. That’s the good news.

But what President Trump failed to mention is that his first year in office marked the lowest level of job creation since 2010. In fact, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 254,000 fewer jobs were created in Trump’s first 11 months in office than were created in the 11 months before he entered office.

Further, when we talk about the economy, what’s most important is to understand what is happening to the average worker. And here’s the story that Trump failed to mention tonight.

Over the last year, after adjusting for inflation, the average worker in America saw a wage increase of, are you ready for this, 4 cents an hour, or 0.17%. Or, to put it in a different way, that worker received a raise of a little more than $1.60 a week. And, as is often the case, that tiny wage increase disappeared as a result of soaring health care costs.

Meanwhile, at a time of massive wealth and income inequality, the rich continue to get much richer while millions of American workers are working two or three jobs just to keep their heads above water. Since March of last year, the three richest people in America saw their wealth increase by more than $68 billion. Three people. A $68 billion increase in wealth. Meanwhile, the average worker saw an increase of 4 cents an hour.

January 28, 2018

Four-year-old Hawra Alaa Hassan was badly burned in a U.S. airstrike in Mosul, Iraq, in 2017. (Felipe Dana / AP)

The greatest impact of Donald Trump’s first year as president has been kept out of sight from most Americans. The wars the U.S. waged during Barack Obama’s tenure have sharply escalated under Trump. The result has been a predictable and massive spike in civilian deaths.

Boasting in an interview last year about an apparent retreat by Islamic State, Trump declared, “I totally changed rules of engagement. I totally changed our military.” He also touted the “big, big difference if you look at the military now” compared with what it was under the Obama administration. While Obama shares blame for escalating the use of drones, especially in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somalia, Trump’s military leadership appears to be a return to a more traditional form of war and a complete unfettering of attempts to minimize civilian casualties.

This unfettering is evident in an almost 50 percent increase of airstrikes in Iraq and Syria during Trump’s first year in office, leading to a rise in civilian deaths by more than 200 percent compared with the year before. The watchdog group Airwars, which has tracked the U.S. war against Islamic State since 2014, remarked, “This unprecedented death toll coincided with the start of the Trump presidency, and suggested in part that policies aimed at protecting civilians had been scaled back under the new administration.” Another analysis by the U.K. organization Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) found that civilian deaths from explosive weapons in Iraq, Syria and Yemen increased by 42 percent in 2017. The group explained that the bigger death toll was largely due to “a massive increase in deadly airstrikes.” While AOAV did not single out the United States, in light of the U.S.’ overt escalation of the wars in those countries, a large proportion of the civilian deaths were likely a result of the new military strategy under Trump.

In addition to Syria and Iraq, U.S. military action in Afghanistan also has dramatically increased. As the Los Angeles Times reported in December: “Operating under looser restrictions on air power that commanders hope will break a stalemate in the war, U.S. fighter planes this year dropped 3,554 explosives in Afghanistan through Oct. 31, the most since 2012.” In December, when the U.S. was expected to slow down for the winter, as it had in the past, it instead continued a steady pace of airstrikes aimed at the Taliban. According to The Washington Post, “For the first time in 16 years, the cold has not slowed the war in the air. U.S. and Afghan forces conducted 455 airstrikes in December, an average of 15 a day, compared with just 65 the year before.”

Unsurprisingly, more civilians were killed last year in Afghanistan, compared with the last year of Obama’s tenure. The United Nations estimates that Afghan civilian deaths from airstrikes were more than 50 percent higher in the first nine months of 2017, compared with the same period a year earlier. The Trump administration also has approved the increase of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, with the grand total expected to be close to 15,000. The longest war the U.S. has ever waged appears to have no end in sight.

January 26, 2018

If Trump Wants to Put America First, Why is He Spending a Trillion Dollars on a Military-Industrial Complex Whose Main Purpose is to Protect Other Countries?

by John Lawrence

There are a thousand US military bases around the world to protect our allies who have practically no military bases. Britain, France and Russia, by contrast, have about 30 foreign bases combined. According to Politico, maintaining bases and troops overseas cost $85 to $100 billion in fiscal year 2014; the total with bases and troops in warzones is $160 to $200 billion. That's $200 billion that could be spent here at home putting America first. Instead, we protect every tinhorn dictatorship in the world and fight losing wars that go on for decades. Trump's got his head up his ass because he's not putting America first. He's maintaining a global military presence in almost every country in the world and the US public is paying for it. It's nuts.

Even the Democrats, other than Bernie Sanders, want to maintain this status quo. That's what Hillary was all about. She thought she had to build and maintain her hawk cred. She had to be tougher than any man because she was a woman. She voted for the Iraq war. Bernie Sanders didn't. Putting America first would mean taking all that money spent on tinhorn dictatorships and spending it here at home building and maintaining infrastructure. It would mean building affordable housing to house the homeless. It would mean Medicare for all. It would mean free public education from preschool up through the university level.

So Trump's basically a fraud. He's all talk and no action when it comes to putting America first. Does he mean putting the US military-industrial complex first or putting the American people first? And why do we give rich countries like Israel almost $4 billion a year? They are not lacking in funds. According to the Atlantic in 2016:

The United States and Israel have made it official: The two countries signed a new 10-year military-assistance deal on Wednesday, representing the single largest pledge of its kind in American history. The pact, laid out in a Memorandum of Understanding, will be worth $38 billion over the course of a decade, an increase of roughly 27 percent on the money pledged in the last agreement, which was signed in 2007. The diplomatic and military alliance between the two countries is longstanding: Even prior to this week, Israel was, according to the Congressional Research Service, “the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II.”

The money spent on foreign aid to rich countries could be much better spent on building infrastructure in poor countries like the countries in which the US has bombed and destroyed infrastructure and private homes and businesses. That's how you win friends in the world, but the US millitary-industrial complex and now Trump don't want peace in the world. That would be bad for business. US defense contractors are making a fortune so they like things just the way they are. They like a polarized world in which we and our allies line up on one side and Russia, Iran, China and their allies line up on the other. This approach to world affairs guarantees large profits for Lockheed, Boeing, Northrup Grumman and their satellites.

World peace would not only be bad for business. It would result in massive unemployment. So maintaining a continuous war footing is the solution.

Anti-capitalist and anti-Trump protesters took to the streets across Switzerland ahead of the U.S. president's expected arrival on Friday. (Photo: Tasnim News Agency/cc)

Ahead of U.S. President Donald Trump's arrival at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, thousands of anti-Trump protesters took to the streets across Switzerland, decrying racism, sexism, capitalism, and dirty energy practices.

"We are protesting against both Trump and the WEF," Young Socialists of Switzerland president Tamara Funiciello toldThe Local, denouncing the U.S. president as well as the meeting that brings together businessmen and world leaders from across the globe.

"The discussions between the richest one percent of the world and a man who fuels an aggressive atmosphere towards women and minorities," Funiciello added, "has no place in Switzerland."

Thousands of people marched in Zurich while hundreds descended on Geneva, Lausanne, and Fribourg. Their signs declared: "Trump Not Welcome"; "Switzerland Is Hosting Nazis"; "World Economic Fiasco"; "Racist Sexist Capitalist"; "Don't Touch Women's Rights"; "There Is No Planet B"; and "No Trump, No Coal, No Gas, No Fossil Fuels."

Despite patrols by thousands of Swiss soldiers and a ban on protesting in Davos, where the meeting is being held, Reuters reports that on Tuesday, "About 20 demonstrators broke through security to reach the Davos Congress Centre, holding banners and shouting 'Wipe out WEF' before they were peacefully disbanded by police."

"Trump is just one of the other people we disagree with. We've been protesting every year now against the World Economic Forum and if Trump comes or not we don't care," one protester in Davos, Alex Hedinger, told Reuters. "Trump is just, maybe he's just the best symbol of this world."

The U.S. president and several of his cabinet members are expected to arrive Friday, the final day of the WEF meeting, and Trump is scheduled to deliver a speech that White House adviser Kellyanne Conway said will bring the "America First" message to the world stage.

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Since The Repubs and the Dems kicked the can down the road on immigration, there's another government shutdown scheduled for less than three weeks. MItch McConnell is going to bring it to the floor. Big deal. It'll never pass because the Repubs don't want it to pass. So there will be another government shutdown while Chuck Schumer tries to deal with the Dealer-in-Chief who don't wanna maka da deal. If he done wanna maka da deal, Chuck Schumer will be running around in circles trying to make an irrational guy be rational.

Trump wants to send the Dreamers home so they can dream in their native lands. He loves the Dreamers and he will love them even more when they are safely home in Mexico on the other side of the Great Wall. After the next government shutdown the twitter sphere will be all lit up with twitters about how the Dems are making our poor military fighting men and women suffer by not paying them while forcing them into battle. Their wives and Mums will not even get their $100, 000. death bonus after they're shot down by the Taliban.

Will the Dems go to the mat for the Dreamers while the Repub propaganda machine grinds out the alternate facts about how the Dems are hurting our fighting men and women? And the Statue of Liberty will be closed. That great symbol of the free and the brave will only be able to be seen from afar. You will have to blow kisses at it instead of stepping right up and hugging it. Park rangers will be furloughed. It'll be terrible. All the while the Dems championing of the Dreamers will be pitted against the Repubs standing tall for our military.

When it's over, the Dreamers will be left twisting in the wind which has always been Trump's intention no matter how much he loves them. It has always been the Repubs' intention as well. Hidden up Mitch McConnell's sleeve is the so-called nuclear option by which is meant he will change the rules of the Senate to eliminate the filibuster for just this one vote. Of course, the Dems will not be able to do that when they have a majority. McConnell did it once to get Gorsuch onto the Supreme Court. He'll do it again with impunity guaranteeing a vote that opens the government without resolving the Dreamer crisis. After that the deportations of the Dreamers will begin.

January 22, 2018

America has never had a president as deeply unpopular at this stage of his presidency, or one who has sucked up more political oxygen. This isn’t good news for the Republican Party this November or in the future, because the GOP has sold its soul to Trump.

Three principles once gave the GOP its identity and mission: Shrink the deficit, defend states’ rights, and be tough on Russia.

Now, after a year with the raving man-child who now occupies the White House, the Republican Party has taken a giant U-turn. Budget deficits are dandy, state’s rights are obsolete, and Russian aggression is no big deal.

By embracing a man whose only principles are winning and getting even, the Republican Party no longer stands for anything other than Trump.

Start with fiscal responsibility.

When George W. Bush took office in 2001, the Congressional Budget Office projected a $5.6 trillion budget surplus over 10 years. Yet even this propitious outlook didn’t stop several Republicans from arguing against the Bush tax cut out of concern it would increase the nation’s debt.

A few years later, congressional Republicans were apoplectic about Obama’s spending plan, necessitated by the 2008 financial crisis. Almost every Republican in Congress opposed it. They argued it would dangerously increase in the federal debt.

“Yesterday the Senate cast one of the most expensive votes in history,” intoned Senator Mitch McConnell. “Americans are wondering how we’re going to pay for all this.” Paul Ryan warned the nation was “heading for a debt crisis.”

Now, with America’s debt at the highest level since shortly after World War II – 77 percent of GDP – Trump and the GOP have enacted a tax law that by their own estimates will increase the debt by at least $1.5 trillion over the decade.

What happened to fiscal responsibility? McConnell, Ryan, and the rest of the GOP have gone mum about it. Politics came first: They and Trump had to enact the big tax cut in order to reward their wealthy patrons.

States’ rights used to be the second pillar of Republican thought.

For decades, Republicans argued that the Constitution’s Tenth Amendment protected the states from federal intermeddling.

They used states’ rights to resist desegregation; to oppose federal legislation protecting workers, consumers, and the environment; and to battle federal attempts to guarantee marriage rights for gays and lesbians.

When, in 2013, the Supreme Court relied on states’ rights to strike down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, then-Senator Jeff Sessions broke out the champagne. “good news!“ said the GOP’s leading advocate of states’ rights. =

But after a year of Trump, Republicans have come around to thinking states have few if any rights.

As Attorney General, Sessions has green-lighted a federal crackdown on marijuana in states that have legalized it.

He and Trump are also blocking sanctuary cities from receiving federal grants. (A federal judge recently stayed Trump’s executive order on grounds that it violates the Tenth Amendment, but Trump and Sessions are appealing the decision.)

Trump is also seeking to gut California’s tough environmental rules. His Interior Department is opening more of California’s federal land and coastline to oil and gas drilling, and Trump’s EPA is moving to repeal new restrictions on a type of heavily-polluting truck California was relying on to meet its climate and air quality goals.

Meanwhile, the Republican House has approved the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, which would prevent states from enforcing their own laws barring concealed handguns against visitors from other states that permitted them.

For the new GOP, states’ rights be damned. Now it’s all about consolidating power in Washington, under Trump.

The third former pillar of Republicanism was a hard line on Russian aggression.

When Obama forged the New Start treaty with Moscow in 2010, Republicans in Congress charged that Vladimir Putin couldn’t be trusted to carry out any arms control agreement.

And they complained that Obama wasn’t doing enough to deter Putin in Eastern Ukraine. “Every time [Obama] goes on national television and threatens Putin or anyone like Putin, everybody’s eyes roll, including mine,” said Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. “We have a weak and indecisive president that invites aggression.”

That was then. Now, despite explicit findings by American intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the 2016 election – the most direct attack on American democracy ever attempted by a foreign power – Republicans in Congress want to give Russia a pass.

They don’t even want to take steps to prevent further Russian meddling. They’ve played down a January report by Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee warning that the Kremlin will likely move to influence upcoming U.S. elections, including those this year and in 2020.

The reason, of course, is the GOP doesn’t want to do anything that might hurt Trump or rile his followers.

The GOP under Trump isn’t the first political party to bend its principles to suit political expediency. But it may be the first to jettison its principles entirely, and over so short a time.

If Republicans no longer care about the federal debt, or state’s rights, or Russian aggression – what exactly do they care about? What are the core principles of today’s Republican Party?

Winning and getting even.

But as a year with Trump as president has shown, this is no formula for governing.

January 21, 2018

Maybe Trump inadvertently hit on something when he called Kim Jong Un by name and referred to him as Little Rocket Man. Never before had a US President even so much as mentioned his name. Kim has wanted to be a player on the world stage, and, now that his little tiff with Trump is all over world headlines, perhaps he feels vindicated. Could this have had the effect of bringing the two Koreas closer together? They do seems to be making peace in light of the Winter Olympics.

Maybe this is all Kim wanted - to be recognized by name. He called Trump a dotard and Trump called him little rocket man, but so what. He engaged in verbal jousting with the leader of the free world. Locker room banter as "grab'em by the pussy" Trump would call it. Guy talk. Well maybe now Kim feels that in order to really get one up on the dotard, he'll make peace with South Korea leaving the US out in the cold. It's really between the two Koreas. The US needn't have anything to do with it.

Well that might be a good thing - a united Korea. One less hot spot in the world. One more area where the US need not be involved. They should go for it.

Moynihan noted that in 2017, Bank of America had $16.6 billion of net income available to shareholders and returned $16.8 billion through dividends and buyback. “So, yes, we will expect to return more capital to shareholders given the tax [cut].”

Even the expectation of a big corporate tax cut have caused shares to soar.

Because the richest 1 percent of Americans owns 40 percent of all shares of stock, and the richest fifth owns 80 percent, this is great news for the wealthy.

Rubbish.Analysts at RBC Capital Markets believe Apple will bring back to the U.S. $207 billion after taxes and “almost all of it” will be used to reward shareholders through share buybacks or dividends.

Apple also announced that all employees will get $2,500 of restricted stock. Good for Apple employees, but another acknowledgement that the biggest beneficiaries of the tax cut will be shareholders.

The new tax law is a great deal for Apple and its shareholders. Apple has been sitting on a huge “overseas” money hoard of some $252 billion, as Apple’s accountants have assigned its earnings to other countries with lower tax rates than the United States.

Now, though, Apple’s accountants can reallocate the money to the United States subject to a one-time tax of 15.5 percent – lower even than the new corporate tax of 21 percent.

In addition, the new law allows U.S. companies to pay only a 10.5 percent tax on “foreign profits” – inviting Apple’s accountants to continue to find ways to transfer its future profits abroad, and further boosting Apple’s shares.

Bottom line: Apple pays less in taxes so it can send out more dividends and buy back more shares of stock.

Make no mistake: Trump and the Republicans are working on behalf of America’s biggest and richest investors, not American workers.

This shouldn’t be surprising. After all, the big investors are the ones who invested in getting Trump and the Republicans into office.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has said he is not taking a 2020 presidential run "off the table," but he has declined to comment any further on his plans beyond this year's relection campaign for the U.S. Senate. (Photo: AP/Jacquelyn Martin/Seth Wenig/Photo montage by Salon)

Politico reported late Monday that Trump had recently shared this view with "a Republican with close ties to the White House." The 71-year-old president's conclusion wasn't based on politics; according to the anonymous Republican, "Trump was hung up on Sanders' age, arguing that Sanders, now 76, wouldn't have the energy to run another national campaign."

Trump also brushed off a potential challenge from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a frequent target of the president's public attacks. "He's always asking people, 'Who do you think is going to run against me?'" the Politico source said of Trump. "I don't think he sees anyone, right now, being a serious competitor."

Although recent polling focused on the 2020 race has shown former Vice President Joe Biden winning over more Democratic voters than Sanders or Warren—with media icon Oprah Winfrey also beating out Warren—since the fall of 2017, the senators have consistentlydefeated Trump in polls that pit them against the president. A November poll (pdf) had Sanders leading Trump 42 to 36 percent.

Sanders has said he is not taking a 2020 presidential run "off the table," but he has declined to comment any further on his plans beyond this year's relection campaign for the U.S. Senate. However, political observers and analysts have suggested both Warren and Sanders are making moves that indicate they will enter the next race for president.

While Sanders has jumped into his role as the Democratic Party's outreach chair—pushing the party further left and fostering relationships with Democrats, even as he maintains his Independent status—Warren has, as Politico noted after the New Year, "amassed more money in her campaign war chest than nearly any senator in modern history, groomed political connections with Democrats who've been skeptical of her in the past, and worked to bolster her bipartisan and foreign policy bona fides."

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